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Gilbert Parker - "The Trespasser, Volume 2."

William Morris - "Chants for Socialists"

Charlotte M Yonge - "Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I)"

Frederick Niecks - "Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician, Volume 1"

One of Our Conquerors, Complete

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




Great English names of young days, before the wintry shadow of the Law
had blighted them, received their withered laurels. Emulous boys were in
the heroic posture. Good! sparring does no hurt: Skepsey seized a likely
lad, Dartrey another. Nature created the Ring for them. Now then, arms
and head well up, chest hearty, shoulders down, out with the right fist,
just below the level of the chin; out with the left fist farther, right
out, except for that bit of curve; so, and draw it slightly back for
wary-pussy at the spring. Firm you stand, feeling the muscles of both
legs, left half a pace ahead, right planted, both stringy. None of your
milk-pail looks; show us jaw, you bulldogs. Now then, left from the
shoulder, straight at right of head.--Good, and alacrity called on vigour
in Skepsey's pupil; Dartrey's had the fist on his mouth before he could
parry right arm up. 'Foul blow!' Dartrey cried. Skepsey vowed to the
contrary. Dartrey reiterated his charge. Skepsey was a figure of
negation, gesticulating and protesting. Dartrey appealed tempestuously to
the Ring; Skepsey likewise, in a tone of injury. He addressed a
remonstrance to Captain Dartrey.

'Hang your captain, sir! I call you a coward; come on,' said the resolute
gentleman, already in ripe form for the attack. His blue eyes were like
the springing sunrise over ridges of the seas; and Skepsey jumped to his
meaning.

Boys and men were spectators of a real scientific set-to, a lovely show.
They were half puzzled, it seemed so deadly. And the little one got in
his blows at the gentleman, who had to be hopping. Only, the worse the
gentleman caught it, the friendlier his countenance became. That was the
wonder, and that gave them the key. But it was deliciously near to the
real thing.

Dartrey and Skepsey shook hands.

'And now, you fellows, you're to know, that this is one of the champions;
and you take your lesson from him and thank him,' Dartrey said, as he
turned on his heel to strike and greet the flow from the house.

'Dartrey come!' Victor, Fenellan, Colney, had him by the hand in turn.
Pure sweetness of suddenly awakened joy sat in Nataly's eyes as she swam
to welcome him, Nesta moved a step, seemed hesitating, and she tripped
forward. 'Dear Captain Dartrey!'

He did not say: 'But what a change in you!'

'It is blue-butterfly, all the same,' Nataly spoke to his look.

Victor hurriedly pronounced the formal introduction between the Hon.
Dudley Sowerby and Captain Dartrey Fenellan. The bronze face and the
milky bowed to one another ceremoniously; the latter faintly flushing.

'So here you are at last,' Victor said. 'You stay with us.'

'To-morrow or later, if you'll have me. I go down to my people to-night.'

'But you stay in England now?' Nataly's voice wavered on the question.

'There's a chance of my being off to Upper Burmah before the week's
ended.'

'Ah, dear, dear!' sighed Fenellan; 'and out of good comes evil!--as
grandfather Deucalion exclaimed, when he gallantly handed up his dripping
wife from the mud of the Deluge waters. Do you mean to be running and
Dewing it on for ever, with only a nod for friends, Dart?'

'Lord, Simmy, what a sound of home there is in your old nonsense!'
Dartrey said.

His eyes of strong dark blue colour and the foreign swarthiness of his
brows and cheeks and neck mixed the familiar and the strange, in the
sight of the women who knew him.

The bill-broker's fair-tressed young wife whispered of curiosity
concerning him to Nataly. He dressed like a sailor, he stood like a
soldier: and was he married? Yes, he was married.

Mrs. Blathenoy imagined a something in Mrs. Radnor's tone. She could
account for it; not by the ordinary reading of the feminine in the
feminine, but through a husband who professed to know secrets. She was
young in years and experience, ten months wedded, disappointedly
awakened, enlivened by the hour, kindled by a novel figure of man,
fretful for a dash of imprudence. This Mrs. Radnor should be the one to
second her very innocent turn for a galopade; her own position allowed of
any little diverting jig or reel, or plunge in a bath--she required it,
for the domestic Jacob Blathenoy was a dry chip: proved such, without a
day's variation during the whole of the ten wedded months. Nataly
gratified her spoken wish. Dartrey Fenellan bowed to the lady, and she
withdrew him, seeing composedly that other and greater ladies had the
wish ungratified. Their husbands were not so rich as hers, and their
complexions would hardly have pleased the handsome brown-faced officer so
well.

Banquet, equal to a blast of trumpet, was the detaining word for the
multitude. It circulated, one knows not how. Eloquent as the whiffs to
the sniffs (and nowhere is eloquence to match it, when the latter are
sharpened from within to without), the word was very soon over the field.
Mr. Carling may have helped; he had it from Fenellan; and he was among
the principal groups, claiming or making acquaintances, as a lawyer
should do. The Concert was complimentarily a topic: Durandarte
divine!--did not everybody think so? Everybody did, in default of a term
for overtopping it. Our language is poor at hyperbole; our voices are
stronger. Gestures and heaven-sent eyeballs invoke to display the
ineffable. Where was Durandarte now? Gone; already gone; off with the
Luciani for evening engagements; he came simply to oblige his dear friend
Mr. Radnor. Cheque fifty guineas: hardly more on both sides than an
exchange of smiles. Ah, these merchant-princes! What of Mr. Radnor's
amateur instrumentalists? Amateurs, they are not to be named: perfect
musicians. Mr. Radnor is the perfection of a host. Yes, yes; Mrs. Radnor;
Miss Radnor too: delicious voices; but what is it about Mr. Radnor so
captivating! He is not quite English, yet he is not at all foreign. Is he
very adventurous in business, as they say?

'Soundest head in the City of London,' Mr. Blathenoy remarked.

Sir Rodwell Blachington gave his nod.

The crowd interjected, half-sighing. We ought to be proud of such a man!
Perhaps we are a trifle exaggerating, says its heart. But that we are
wholly grateful to him, is a distinct conclusion. And he may be one of
the great men of his time: he has a quite individual style of dress.

Lady Rodwell Blachington observed to Colney Durance:

'Mr. Radnor bids fair to become the idol of the English people.'

'If he can prove himself to be sufficiently the dupe of the English
people,' said Colney.

'Idol--dupe?' interjected Sir Rodwell, and his eyebrows fixed at the
perch of Colney's famous 'national interrogation' over vacancy of
understanding, as if from the pull of a string. He had his audience with
him; and the satirist had nothing but his inner gush of acids at sight of
a planted barb.

Colney was asked to explain. He never explained. He performed a series of
astonishing leaps, like the branchy baboon above the traveller's head in
the tropical forest, and led them into the trap they assisted him to
prepare for them. 'No humour, do you say? The English have no humour?' a
nephew of Lady Blachington's inquired of him, with polite pugnacity, and
was cordially assured, that 'he vindicated them.'

'And Altruistic! another specimen of the modern coinage,' a classical
Church dignitary, in grammarian disgust, remarked to a lady, as they
passed.

Colney pricked-up his ears. It struck him that he might fish for
suggestions in aid of the Grand Argument before the Elders of the Court
of Japan. Dr. Wardan, whose recognition he could claim, stated to him,
that the lady and he were enumerating words of a doubtfully legitimate
quality now being inflicted upon the language.

'The slang from below is perhaps preferable?' said Colney.

'As little-less.'

'But a pirate-tongue, cut-off from its roots, must continue to practise
piracy, surely, or else take reinforcements in slang, otherwise it is
inexpressive of new ideas.'

'Possibly the new ideas are best expressed in slang.'

'If insular. They will consequently be incommunicable to foreigners. You
would, then, have us be trading with tokens instead of a precious
currency? Yet I cannot perceive the advantage of letting our ideas be
clothed so racy of the obscener soil; considering the pretensions of the
English language to become the universal. If we refuse additions from
above, they force themselves on us from below.'

Dr. Wardan liked the frame of the observations, disliked the substance.

'One is to understand that the English language has these pretensions?'
he said:--he minced in his manner, after the well-known mortar-board and
tassel type; the mouthing of a petrifaction: clearly useless to the
pleadings of the patriotic Dr. Bouthoin and his curate.

He gave no grip to Colney, who groaned at cheap Donnish sarcasm, and let
him go, after dealing him a hard pellet or two in a cracker-covering.

There was Victor all over the field netting his ephemerae! And he who
feeds on them, to pay a price for their congratulations and flatteries,
he is one of them himself!

Nesta came tripping from the Rev. Septimus Barmby. 'Dear Mr. Durance,
where is Captain Dartrey?'

Mrs. Blathenoy had just conducted her husband through a crowd, for an
introduction of him to Captain Dartrey. That was perceptible.

Dudley Sowerby followed Nesta closely: he struck across the path of the
Rev. Septimus: again he had the hollow of her ear at his disposal.

'Mr. Radnor was excellent. He does everything consummately: really, we
are all sensible of it. I am. He must lead us in a symphony. These light
"champagne overtures" of French composers, as Mr. Fenellan calls them, do
not bring out his whole ability:--Zampa, Le Pre aux clercs, Masaniello,
and the like.'

'Your duet together went well.'

'Thanks to you--to you. You kept us together.'

'Papa was the runaway or strain-the-leash, if there was one.'

'He is impetuous, he is so fervent. But, Miss Radnor, I could not be the
runaway-with you . . . with you at the piano. Indeed, I . . . shall we
stroll down? I love the lake.'

'You will hear the bell for your cold dinner very soon.'

'I am not hungry. I would so much rather talk--hear you. But you are
hungry? You have been singing twice: three times! Opera singers, they
say, eat hot suppers; they drink stout. And I never heard your voice more
effective. Yours is a voice that . . . something of the feeling one has
in hearing cathedral voices: carry one up. I remember, in Dresden, once,
a Fraulein Kuhnstreich, a prodigy, very young, considering her
accomplishments. But it was not the same.'

Nesta wondered at Dartrey Fenellan for staying so long with Mr. and Mrs.
Blathenoy.

'Ah, Mr. Sowerby, if I am to have flattery, I cannot take it as a
milliner's dumb figure wears the beautiful dress; I must point out my
view of some of my merits.'

'Oh! do, I beg, Miss . . . You have a Christian name and I too: and once
. . . not Mr. Sowerby: yes, it was Dudley!

'Quite accidentally, and a world of pardons entreated.'

'And Dudley begged Dudley might be Dudley always!'

He was deepening to the Barmby intonation--apparently Cupid's; but a
shade more airily Pagan, not so fearfully clerical.

Her father had withdrawn Dartrey Fenellan from Mr. and Mrs. Blathenoy.
Dr. Schlesien was bowing with Dartrey.

'And if Durandarte would only--but you are one with Miss Graves to
depreciate my Durandarte, in favour of the more classical Jachimo; whom
we all admire; but you shall be just,' said she, and she pouted. She had
seen her father plant Dartrey Fenellan in the midst of a group of City
gentlemen.

Simeon touched among them to pluck at his brother. He had not a chance;
he retired, and swam into the salmon-net of seductive Mrs. Blathenoy's
broad bright smile.

'It's a matter of mines, and they're hovering in the attitude of the
query, like corkscrews over a bottle, profoundly indifferent to
blood-relationships,' he said to her.

'Pray, stay and be consoled by me,' said the fair young woman. 'You are
to point me out all the distinguished people. Is it true, that your
brother has left the army?'

'Dartrey no longer wears the red. Here comes Colonel Corfe, who does.
England has her army still!'

'His wife persuaded him?'

'You see he is wearing the black.'

'For her? How very very sad! Tell me--what a funnily dressed woman
meeting that gentleman!'

'Hush--a friend of the warrior. Splendid weather, Colonel Corfe.'

'Superb toilettes!' The colonel eyed Mrs. Blathenoy dilatingly, advanced,
bowed, and opened the siege.

She decided a calculation upon his age, made a wall of it, smilingly
agreed with his encomium of the Concert, and toned her voice to
Fenellan's comprehension: 'Did it occur recently?'

'Months; in Africa; I haven't the date.'

'Such numbers of people one would wish to know! Who are those ladies
holding a Court, where Mr. Radnor is?'

'Lady Carmine, Lady Swanage--if it is your wish?' interposed the colonel.

She dealt him a forgiving smile. 'And that pleasant-looking old
gentleman?'

Colonel Corfe drew-up. Fenellan said: 'Are we veterans at forty or so?'

'Well, it 's the romance, perhaps!' She raised her shoulders.

The colonel's intelligence ran a dog's nose for a lady's interjections.
'The romance? . . . at forty, fifty? gone? Miss Julinks, the great
heiress and a beauty; has chosen him over the heads of all the young men
of his time. Cranmer Lotsdale. Most romantic history!'

'She's in love with that, I suppose.'

'Now you direct my attention to him,' said Fenellan, 'the writing of the
romantic history has made the texture look a trifle thready. You have a
terrible eye.'

It was thrown to where the person stood who had first within a few
minutes helped her to form critical estimates of men, more consciously to
read them.

'Your brother stays in England?'

'The fear is, that he's off again.'

'Annoying for you. If I had a brother, I would not let him go.'

'How would you detain him?'

'Locks and bolts, clock wrong, hands and arms, kneeling--the fourth act
of the Huguenots!'

'He went by way of the window, I think. But that was a lover.'

'Oh! well!' she flushed. She did not hear the 'neglected and astonished
colonel speak, and she sought diversion in saying to Fenellan: 'So many
people of distinction are assembled here to-day! Tell me, who is that
pompous gentleman, who holds his arms up doubled, as he walks?'

'Like flappers of a penguin: and advances in jerks: he is head of the
great Firm of Quatley Brothers: Sir Abraham: finances or farms one of the
South American Republics: we call him, Pride of Port. He consumes it and
he presents it.'

'And who is that little man, who stops everybody?'

'People of distinction indeed! That little man--is your upper lip
underrateing him? . . . When a lady's lip is erratically disdainful, it
suggests a misuse of a copious treasury, deserving to be mulcted,
punished--how?--who can say?--that little man, now that little man, with
a lift of his little finger, could convulse the Bacon Market!'

Mrs. Blathenoy shook. Hearing Colonel Corfe exclaim:

'Bacon Market!' she let fly a peal. Then she turned to a fresh satellite,
a round and a ruddy, 'at her service ever,' Mr. Beaves Urmsing, and
repeated Fenellan's words. He, in unfeigned wonderment at such
unsuspected powers, cried: 'Dear me!' and stared at the little man,
making the pretty lady's face a twinkling dew.

He had missed the Concert. Was it first-rate? Ecstasy answered in the
female voice.

'Hem'd fool I am to keep appointments!' he muttered.

She reproved him: 'Fie, Mr. Urmsing; it's the making of them, not the
keeping!'

'Ah, my dear ma'am, if I'd had Blathenoy's luck when he made a certain
appointment. And he was not so much older than me? The old ones get the
prizes!'

Mr. Beaves Urmsing prompted Colonel Corfe to laugh in triumph. The
colonel's eyebrows were up in fixity over sleepy lids. He brightened to
propose the conducting of the pretty woman to the banquet.

'We shall see them going in,' said she. 'Mr. Radnor has a French cook,
who does wonders. But I heard him asking for Mr. Beaves Urmsing. I'm sure
he expected The Marigolds at his Concert.'

'Anything to oblige the company,' said the rustic ready chorister,
clearing his throat.

The lady's feet were bent in the direction of a grassy knoll, where
sunflowers, tulips, dahlias, peonies, of the sex eclipsed at a distance
its roses and lilies. Fenellan saw Dartrey, still a centre of the
merchantmen, strolling thither.

'And do you know, your brother is good enough to dine with us next week,
Thursday, down here,' she murmured. 'I could venture to command?--if you
are not induced.'

'Whichever word applies to a faithful subject.'

'I do so wish your brother had not left the army!'

'You have one son of Mars.'

Her eyes took the colonel up to cast him down: he was not the antidote.
She said to him: 'Luciani's voice wears better than her figure.'

The colonel replied: 'I remember,' and corrected himself, 'at Eton, in
jackets: she was not so particularly slim; never knew how to dress. You
beat Italians there! She moved one as a youngster.'

'Eton boys are so susceptible!'

'Why, hulloa, don't I remember her coming out!--and do you mean to tell
me,' Mr. Beaves Urmsing brutally addressed the colonel, 'that you were at
Eton when . . . why, what age do you give the poor woman, then!' He
bellowed, 'Eh?' as it were a bull crowing.

The colonel retreated to one of his defensive corners. 'I am not aware
that I meant to tell you anything.'

Mr. Beaves Urmsing turned square-breasted on Fenellan: 'Fellow's a born
donkey!'

'And the mother lived?' said Fenellan.

Mr. Beaves Urmsing puffed with wrath at the fellow.

Five minutes later, in the midst of the group surrounding and
felicitating Victor, he had sight of Fenellan conversing with fair ones,
and it struck a light in him; he went three steps backward, with shouts.
'Dam funny fellow! eh? who is he? I must have that man at my table. Worth
fifty Colonel Jackasses! And I 've got a son in the Guards: and as much
laugh in him, he 's got, as a bladder. But we'll make a party, eh,
Radnor? with that friend o' yours. Dam funny fellow! and precious little
of it going on now among the young lot. They're for seeing ghosts and
gaping their jaws; all for the quavers instead of the capers.'

He sounded and thrummed his roguish fling-off for the capers. A second
glimpse of Fenellan agitated the anecdote, as he called it, seizing
Victor's arm, to have him out of earshot of the ladies. Delivery, not
without its throes, was accomplished, but imperfectly, owing to
sympathetic convulsions, under which Mr. Beaves Urmsing's countenance was
crinkled of many colours, as we see the Spring rhubarb-leaf. Unable to
repeat the brevity of Fenellan's rejoinder, he expatiated on it to convey
it, swearing that it was the kind of thing done in the old days, when men
were witty dogs:--'pat! and pat back! as in the pantomime.'

'Repartee!' said Victor. 'He has it. You shall know him. You're the man
for him.'

'He for me, that he is!--"Hope the mother's doing well? My card":--eh?
Grave as an owl! Look, there goes the donkey, lady to right and left, all
ears for him--ha! ha! I must have another turn with your friend. "Mother
lived, did she?" Dam funny fellow, all of the olden time! And a dinner,
bachelor dinner, six of us, at my place, next week, say Wednesday,
half-past six, for a long evening--flowing bowl--eh, shall it be?'

Nesta came looking to find her Captain Dartrey.

Mr. Beaves Urmsing grew courtly of the olden time. He spied Colonel Corfe
anew, and 'Donkey!' rose to split the roar at his mouth, and full of his
anecdote, he pursued some congenial acquaintances, crying to his host:
'Wednesday, mind! eh? by George, your friend's gizzarded me for the day!'

Plumped with the rich red stream of life, this last of the squires of old
England thumped along among the guests, a very tuning-fork to keep them
at their pitch of enthusiasm. He encountered Mr. Caddis, and it was an
encounter. Mr. Caddis represented his political opinions; but here was
this cur of a Caddis whineing his niminy note from his piminy nob, when
he was asked for his hearty echo of the praises of this jolly good fellow
come to waken the neighbourhood, to be a blessing, a blazing hearth, a
fall of manna:--and thank the Lord for him, you desertdog! 'He 's a
merchant prince, and he's a prince of a man, if you're for titles. Eh?
you "assent to my encomiums." You'll be calling me Mr. Speaker next. Hang
me, Caddis, if those Parliamentary benches of yours aren't freezing you
from your seat up, and have got to your jaw--my belief!'

Mr. Caddis was left reflecting, that we have, in the dispensations of
Providence, when we have a seat, to submit to castigations from butcherly
men unaccountably commissioned to solidify the seat. He could have
preached a discourse upon Success, to quiet the discontentment of the
unseated. And our world of seats oddly gained, quaintly occupied,
maliciously beset, insensately envied, needs the discourse. But it was
not delivered, else would it have been here written down without mercy,
as a medical prescript, one of the grand specifics. He met Victor, and,
between his dread of him and the counsels of a position subject to
stripes, he was a genial thaw. Victor beamed; for Mr. Caddis had
previously stood eminent as an iceberg of the Lakelands' party. Mr.
Inchling and Mr. Caddis were introduced. The former in Commerce, the
latter in Politics, their sustaining boast was, the being our stable
Englishmen; and at once, with cousinly minds, they fell to chatting upon
the nothings agreeably and seriously. Colney Durance forsook a set of
ladies for fatter prey, and listened to them. What he said, Victor did
not hear. The effect was always to be seen, with Inchling under Colney.
Fenellan did better service, really good service.

Nataly played the heroine she was at heart. Why think of her as having to
act a character! Twice had Carling that afternoon, indirectly and
directly, stated Mrs. Burman to be near the end we crape a natural, a
defensible, satisfaction to hear of:--not wishing it--poor woman!--but
pardonably, before man and all the angels, wishing, praying for the
beloved one to enter into her earthly peace by the agency of the other's
exit into her heavenly.

Fenellan and Colney came together, and said a word apiece of their
friend.

'In his element! The dear old boy has the look of a goldfish, king of his
globe.'

'The dear old boy has to me the look of a pot on the fire, with a loose
lid.'

I may have the summons from Themison to-morrow, Victor thought. The
success of the day, was a wine that rocked the soberest of thoughts. For,
strange to confess, ever since the fall on London Bridge, his heart,
influenced in some degree by Nataly's depression perhaps, had been
shadowed by doubts of his infallible instinct for success. Here, at a
stroke, and before entering the house, he had the whole neighbourhood
about him: he could feel that he and Nataly stood in the minds of the
worthy people variously with the brightness if not with the warmth
distinguishable in the bosom of Beaves Urmsing--the idea of whom gave
Lakelands an immediate hearth-glow.

Armandine was thirteen minutes, by his watch, behind the time she had
named. Small blame to her. He excused her to Lady Carmine, Lady Swanage,
Lady Blachington, Mrs. Fanning, Sir Abraham Quatley, Mr. Danny (of Bacon
fame) and the rest of the group surrounding Nataly on the mound leftward
of the white terraces descending to the lake; where she stood beating her
foot fretfully at the word brought by Nesta, that Dartrey Fenellan had
departed. It was her sunshine departed. But she went through her task of
conversing amiably. Colney, for a wonder, consented to be useful in
assisting Fenellan to relate stories of French Cooks; which were, like
the Royal Hanoverian oyster, of an age for offering acceptable flavour to
English hearers. Nesta drew her mother's attention to Priscilla Graves
and Skepsey; the latter bending head and assenting. Nataly spoke of the
charm of Priscilla's voice that day, in her duet with the Rev. Septimus.
Mr. Pempton looked; he saw that Priscilla was proselytizing. She was
perfection to him but for one blotting thing. With grief on his eyelids,
he said to Nataly or to himself: 'Meat!'

'Dear friend, don't ride your hobby over us,' she replied.

'But it's with that object they mount it,' said Victor.

The greater ladies of the assembly were quite ready to accuse the
sections, down to the individuals, of the social English (reserving our
elect) of an itch to be tyrants.

Colney was apologizing for them, with his lash: 'It's merely the sensible
effect of a want of polish of the surface when they rub together.'

And he heard Carling exclaim to Victor: 'How comes the fellow here!'

Skepsey had rushed across an open space to intercept a leisurely
progressive man, whose hat was of the shape Victor knew; and the man wore
the known black gaiters. In appearance, he had the likeness of a fallen
parson.

Carling and Victor crossed looks that were questions carrying their
answers.