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One of Our Conquerors, Complete

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




Nataly was not so generously encountered in idea.

He felt and regretted this. He greeted her with a doubled
affectionateness. Her pitiable deficiency of courage, excusing a man for
this and that small matter in the thick of the conflict, made demands on
him for gentle treatment.

'You have not seen any one?' she asked.

'City people. And you, my love?'

'Mr. Barmby called. He has gone down to Tunbridge Wells for a week, to
some friend there.' She added, in pain of thought: 'I have seen Dartrey.
He has brought Lord Clanconan to town, for a consultation, and expects he
will have to take him to Brighton.'

'Brighton? What a life for a man like Dartrey, at Brighton!'

Her breast heaved. 'If I cannot see my Nesta there, he will bring her up
to me for a day:

'But, my dear, I will bring her up to you, if it is your wish to see
her.'

'It is becoming imperative that I should.'

'No hurry, no hurry: wait till the end of next week. And I must see
Dartrey, on business, at once!'

She gave the address in a neighbouring square. He had minutes to spare
before dinner, and flew. She was not inquisitive.

Colney Durance had told Dartrey that Victor was killing her. She had
little animation; her smiles were ready, but faint. After her interview
with Dudley, there had been a swoon at home; and her maid, sworn to
secrecy, willingly spared a tender-hearted husband--so good a master.




CHAPTER XXVIII

MRS. MARSETT

Little acts of kindness were not beyond the range of Colney Durance, and
he ran down to Brighton, to give the exiled Nesta some taste of her
friendly London circle. The Duvidney ladies knew that the dreaded
gentleman had a regard for the girl. Their own, which was becoming warmer
than they liked to think, was impressed by his manner of conversing with
her. 'Child though she was,' he paid her the compliment of a sober as
well as a satirical review of the day's political matter and recent
publications; and the ladies were introduced, in a wonderment, to the
damsel Delphica. They listened placidly to a discourse upon her
performances, Japanese to their understandings.

At New York, behold, another adventurous representative and advocate of
the European tongues has joined the party: Signor Jeridomani: a
philologer, of course; a politician in addition; Macchiavelli redivivus,
it seems to fair Delphica. The speech he delivers at the Syndicate
Delmonico Dinner, is justly applauded by the New York Press as a
masterpiece of astuteness. He appears to be the only one of the party who
has an eye for the dark. She fancies she may know a more widely awake in
the abstract. But now, thanks to jubilant Journals and Homeric laughter
over the Continent, the secret is out, in so far as the concurrents are
all unmasked and exposed for the edification of the American public. Dr.
Bouthoin's eyebrows are up, Mr. Semhians disfigures his name by greatly
gaping. Shall they return to their Great Britain indignant? Patriotism,
with the sauce of a luxurious expedition at no cost to the private purse,
restrains them. Moreover, there is no sign of any one of the others
intending to quit the expedition; and Mr. Semhians has done a marvel or
two in the cricket-field: Old England looks up where she can. What is
painfully extraordinary to our couple, they find in the frigid attitude
of the Americans toward their 'common tongue'; together with the rumour
of a design to despatch an American rival emissary to Japan.

Nesta listened, inquired, commented, laughed; the ladies could not have a
doubt that she was interested and understood. She would have sketches of
scenes between Delphica and M. Falarique, with whom the young Germania
was cleverly ingenuous indeed--a seminary Celimene; and between Delphica
and M. Mytharete, with whom she was archaeological, ravishingly amoebaean
of Homer. Dr. Gannius holds a trump card in his artless daughter,
conjecturally, for the establishment of the language of the gutturals in
the far East. He has now a suspicion, that the inventive M. Falarique,
melted down to sobriety by misfortune, may some day startle their camp by
the cast of more than a crow into it, and he is bent on establishing
alliances; frightens the supple Signor Jeridomani to lingual fixity;
eulogizes Football, with Dr. Bouthoin; and retracts, or modifies, his
dictum upon the English, that, 'masculine brawn they have in their
bodies, but muscle they have not in their feminine minds'; to exalt them,
for a signally clean, if a dense, people: 'Amousia, not Alousia, is their
enemy:'--How, when we have the noblest crop of poets? 'You have never
heartily embraced those aliens among you until you learnt from us, that
you might brag of them.'--Have they not endowed us with the richest of
languages? 'The words of which are used by you, as old slippers, for
puns.' Mr. Semhians has been superciliously and ineffectively punning in
foreign presences: he and his chief are inwardly shocked by a new
perception; What if, now that we have the populace for paymaster,
subservience to the literary tastes of the populace should reduce the
nation to its lowest mental level, and render us not only unable to
compete with the foreigner, but unintelligible to him, although so
proudly paid at home! Is it not thus that nations are seen of the Highest
to be devouring themselves?

'For,' says Dr. Gannius, as if divining them, 'this excessive and
applauded productiveness, both of your juvenile and your senile, in your
modern literature, is it ever a crop? Is it even the restorative
perishable stuff of the markets? Is it not rather your street-pavement's
patter of raindrops, incessantly in motion, and as fruitful?' Mr.
Semhians appeals to Delphica. 'Genius you have,' says she, stiffening his
neck-band, 'genius in superabundance':--he throttles to the complexion of
the peony:--'perhaps criticism is wanting.' Dr. Gannius adds: 'Perhaps it
is the drill-sergeant everywhere wanting for an unrivalled splendid
rabble!'

Colney left the whole body of concurrents on the raised flooring of a
famous New York Hall, clearly entrapped, and incited to debate before an
enormous audience, as to the merits of their respective languages. 'I
hear,' says Dr. Bouthoin to Mr. Semhians (whose gape is daily extending),
'that the tickets cost ten dollars!'

There was not enough of Delphicafor Nests.

Colney asked: 'Have you seen any of our band?'

'No,' she said, with good cheer, and became thoughtful, conscious of a
funny reason for the wish to hear of the fictitious creature disliked by
Dudley. A funny and a naughty reason, was it? Not so very naughty: but it
was funny; for it was a spirit of opposition to Dudley, without an
inferior feeling at all, such as girls should have.

Colney brought his viola for a duet; they had a pleasant musical evening,
as in old days at Creckholt; and Nesta, going upstairs with the ladies to
bed, made them share her father's amused view of the lamb of the flock
this bitter gentleman became when he had the melodious instrument tucked
under his chin. He was a guest for the night. Dressing in the early hour,
Nests saw him from her window on the parade, and soon joined him, to hear
him at his bitterest, in the flush of the brine. 'These lengths of
blank-faced terraces fronting sea!' were the satirist's present black
beast. 'So these moneyed English shoulder to the front place; and that is
the appearance they offer to their commercial God!' He gazed along the
miles of 'English countenance,' drearily laughing. Changeful ocean seemed
to laugh at the spectacle. Some Orphic joke inspired his exclamation:
'Capital!'

'Come where the shops are,' said Nesta.

'And how many thousand parsons have you here?'

'Ten, I think,' she answered in his vein, and warmed him; leading him
contemplatively to scrutinize her admirers: the Rev. Septimus; Mr.
Sowerby.

'News of our friend of the whimpering flute?'

'Here? no. I have to understand you!'

Colney cast a weariful look backward on the 'regiments of Anglo-Chinese'
represented to him by the moneyed terraces, and said: 'The face of a
stopped watch!--the only meaning it has is past date.'

He had no liking for Dudley Sowerby. But it might have been an allusion
to the general view of the houses. But again, 'the meaning of it past
date,' stuck in her memory. A certain face close on handsome, had a fatal
susceptibility to caricature.

She spoke of her 'exile': wanted Skepsey to come down to her; moaned over
the loss of her Louise. The puzzle of the reason for the long separation
from her parents, was evident in her mind, and unmentioned.

They turned on to the pier.

Nesta reminded him of certain verses he had written to celebrate her
visit to the place when she was a child:

'"And then along the pier we sped,
And there we saw a Whale
He seemed to have a Normous Head,
And not a bit of Tail!"'

'Manifestly a foreigner to our shores, where the exactly inverse
condition rules,' Colney said.

'"And then we scampered on the beach,
To chase the foaming wave;
And when we ran beyond its reach
We all became more brave."'

Colney remarked: 'I was a poet--for once.'

A neat-legged Parisianly-booted lady, having the sea, winds very
enterprising with her dark wavy, locks and jacket and skirts, gave a cry
of pleasure and--a silvery 'You dear!' at sight of Nesta; then at sight
of one of us, moderated her tone to a propriety equalling the most
conventional. 'We ride to-day?'

'I shall be one,' said Nesta.

'It would not be the commonest pleasure to me, if you were absent.'

'Till eleven, then!'

'After my morning letter to Ned.'

She sprinkled silvery sound on that name or on the adieu, blushed,
blinked, frowned, sweetened her lip-lines, bit at the underone, and
passed in a discomposure.

'The lady?' Colney asked.

'She is--I meet her in the troop conducted by the riding-master: Mrs.
Marsett.'

'And who is Ned?'

'It is her husband, to whom she writes every morning. He is a captain in
the army, or was. He is in Norway, fishing.'

'Then the probability is, that the English officer continues his military
studies.'

'Do you not think her handsome, Mr. Durance?'

'Ned may boast of his possession, when he has trimmed it and toned it a
little!

'She is different, if you are alone with her.'

'It is not unusual,' said Colney.

At eleven o'clock he was in London, and Nesta rode beside Mrs. Marsett
amid the troop.

A South-easterly wind blew the waters to shifty goldleaf prints of
brilliance under the sun.

'I took a liberty this morning, I called you "Dear" this morning,' the
lady said. 'It's what I feel, only I have no right to blurt out
everything I feel, and I was ashamed. I am sure I must have appeared
ridiculous. I got quite nervous.'

'You would not be ridiculous to me.'

'I remember I spoke of Ned!

'You have spoken of him before.'

'Oh! I know: to you alone. I should like to pluck out my heart and pitch
it on the waves, to see whether it would sink or swim. That's a funny
idea, isn't it! I tell you everything that comes up. What shall I do when
I lose you! You always make me feel you've a lot of poetry ready-made in
you.'

'We will write. And you will have your husband then.'

'When I had finished my letter to Ned, I dropped my head on it and
behaved like a fool for several minutes. I can't bear the thought of
losing you!'

'But you don't lose me,' said Nesta; 'there is no ground for your
supposing that you will. And your wish not to lose me, binds me to you
more closely.'

'If you knew!' Mrs. Marsett caught at her slippery tongue, and she
carolled: 'If we all knew everything, we should be wiser, and what a
naked lot of people we should be!'

They were crossing the passage of a cavalcade of gentlemen, at the end of
the East Cliff. One among them, large and dominant, with a playful voice
of brass, cried out:

'And how do you do, Mrs. Judith Marsett--ha? Beautiful morning?'

Mrs. Marsett's figure tightened; she rode stonily erect, looked level
ahead. Her woman's red mouth was shut fast on a fighting underlip.

'He did not salute you,' Nesta remarked, to justify her for not having
responded.

The lady breathed a low thunder: 'Coward!'

'He cannot have intended to insult you,' said Nesta.

'That man knows I will not notice him. He is a beast. He will learn that
I carry a horsewhip.'

'Are you not taking a little incident too much to heart?'

The sigh of the heavily laden came from Mrs. Marsett.

'Am I pale? I dare say. I shall go on my knees tonight hating myself that
I was born "one of the frail sex." We are, or we should ride at the
coward and strike him to the ground. Pray, pray do not look distressed!
Now you know my Christian name. That dog of a man barks it out on the
roads. It doesn't matter.'

'He has offended you before?'

'You are near me. They can't hurt me, can't touch me, when I think that I
'm talking with you. How I envy those who call you by your Christian
name!'

'Nesta,' said smiling Nesta. The smile was forced, that she might show
kindness, for the lady was jarring on her.

Mrs. Marsett opened her lips: 'Oh, my God, I shall be crying!--let's
gallop. No, wait, I'll tell you. I wish I could! I will tell you of that
man. That man is Major Worrell. One of the majors who manage to get to
their grade. A retired warrior. He married a handsome woman, above him in
rank, with money; a good woman. She was a good woman, or she would have
had her vengeance, and there was never a word against her. She must have
loved that--Ned calls him, full-blooded ox. He spent her money and he
deceived her.--You innocent! Oh, you dear! I'd give the world to have
your eyes. I've heard tell of "crystal clear," but eyes like yours have
to tell me how deep and clear. Such a world for them to be in! I did
pray, and used your name last night on my knees, that you--I said
Nesta--might never have to go through other women's miseries. Ah me! I
have to tell you he deceived her. You don't quite understand.'

'I do understand,' said Nesta.

'God help you!--I am excited to-day. That man is poison to me. His wife
forgave him three times. On three occasions, that unhappy woman forgave
him. He is great at his oaths, and a big breaker of them. She walked out
one November afternoon and met him riding along with a notorious
creature. You know there are bad women. They passed her, laughing. And
look there, Nesta, see that groyne; that very one.' Mrs. Marsett pointed
her whip hard out. 'The poor lady went down from the height here; she
walked into that rough water look!--steadying herself along it, and she
plunged; she never came out alive. A week after her burial, Major
Worrell--I 've told you enough.'

'We 'll gallop now,' said Nesta.

Mrs. Marsett's talk, her presence hardly less, affected the girl with
those intimations of tumult shown upon smooth waters when the great
elements are conspiring. She felt that there was a cause why she had to
pity, did pity her. It might be, that Captain Marsett wedded one who was
of inferior station,' and his wife had to bear blows from cruel people.
The supposition seemed probable. The girl accepted it; for beyond it, as
the gathering of the gale masked by hills, lay a brewing silence. What?
She did not reflect. Her quick physical sensibility curled to some breath
of heated atmosphere brought about her by this new acquaintance: not
pleasant, if she had thought of pleasure: intensely suggestive of our
life at the consuming tragic core, round which the furnace pants. But she
was unreflecting, feeling only a beyond and hidden.

Besides, she was an exile. Spelling at dark things in the dark, getting
to have the sight which peruses darkness, she touched the door of a
mystery that denied her its key, but showed the lock; and her life was
beginning to know of hours that fretted her to recklessness. Her friend
Louise was absent: she had so few friends--owing to that unsolved reason:
she wanted one, of any kind, if only gentle: and this lady seemed to need
her: and she flattered; Nesta was in the mood for swallowing and
digesting and making sweet blood of flattery.

At one time, she liked Mrs. Marsett best absent: in musing on her,
wishing her well, having said the adieu. For it was wearisome to hear
praises of 'innocence'; and women can do so little to cure that
'wickedness of men,' among the lady's conversational themes; and 'love'
too: it may be a 'plague,' and it may be 'heaven': it is better left
unspoken of. But there were times when Mrs. Marsett's looks and tones
touched compassion to press her hand: an act that had a pledgeing
signification in the girl's bosom: and when, by the simple avoidance of
ejaculatory fervours, Mrs. Marsett's quieted good looks had a shadow of a
tender charm, more pathetic than her outcries were.

These had not always the sanction of polite usage: and her English was
guilty of sudden lapses to the Thameswater English of commerce and
drainage instead of the upper wells. But there are many uneducated ladies
in the land. Many, too, whose tastes in romantic literature betray now
and then by peeps a similarity to Nesta's maid Mary's. Mrs. Marsett liked
love, blood, and adventure. She had, moreover, a favourite noble poet,
and she begged Nesta's pardon for naming him, and she would not name him,
and told her she must not read him until she was a married woman, because
he did mischief to girls. Thereupon she fell into one of her silences,
emerging with a cry of hate of herself for having ever read him. She did
not blame the bard. And, ah, poor bard! he fought his battle: he shall
not be named for the brand on the name. He has lit a sulphur match for
the lover of nature through many a generation; and to be forgiven by sad
frail souls who could accuse him of pipeing devil's agent to them at the
perilous instant--poor girls too!--is chastisement enough. This it is to
be the author of unholy sweets: a Posterity sitting in judgement will
grant, that they were part of his honest battle with the hypocrite
English Philistine, without being dupe of the plea or at all the thirsty
swallower of his sugary brandy. Mrs. Marsett expressed aloud her gladness
of escape in never having met a man like him; followed by her regret that
'Ned' was so utterly unlike; except 'perhaps'--and she hummed; she was
off on the fraternity in wickedness.

Nesta's ears were fatigued. 'My mother writes of you,' she said, to vary
the subject.

Mrs. Marsett looked. She sighed downright: 'I have had my dream of a
friend!--It was that gentleman with you on the pier! Your mother
objects?'

'She has inquired, nothing more.'

'I am not twenty-three: not as old as I should be, for a guide to you. I
know I would never do you harm. That I know. I would walk into that water
first, and take Mrs. Worrell's plunge:--the last bath; a thorough
cleanser for a woman! Only, she was a good woman and didn't want it, as
we--as lots of us do:--to wash off all recollection of having met a man!
Your mother would not like me to call you Nesta! I have never begged you
to call me Judith. Damnable name!' Mrs. Marsett revelled in the heat of
the curse on it, as a relief to torture of the breast, until a sense of
the girl's alarmed hearing sent the word reverberating along her nerves
and shocked her with such an exposure of our Shaggy wild one on a lady's
lips. She murmured: 'Forgive me,' and had the passion to repeat the
epithet in shrieks, and scratch up male speech for a hatefuller; but the
twitch of Nesta's brows made her say: 'Do pardon me. I did something in
Scripture. Judith could again. Since that brute Worrell crossed me riding
with you, I loathe my name; I want to do things. I have offended you.'

'We have been taught differently. I do not use those words. Nothing
else.'

'They frighten you.'

'They make me shut; that is all.'

'Supposing you were some day to discover . . . ta-tata, all the things
there are in the world.' Mrs. Marsett let fly an artificial chirrup. 'You
must have some ideas of me.'

'I think you have had unhappy experiences.'

'Nesta . . . just now and then! the first time we rode out together,
coming back from the downs, I remember, I spoke, without thinking--I was
enraged--of a case in the newspapers; and you had seen it, and you were
not afraid to talk of it. I remember I thought, Well, for a girl, she's
bold! I thought you knew more than a girl ought to know: until--you
did--you set my heart going. You spoke of the poor women like an angel of
compassion. You said, we were all mixed up with their fate--I forget the
words. But no one ever heard in Church anything that touched me so. I
worshipped you. You said, you thought of them often, and longed to find
out what you could do to help. And I thought, if they could hear you, and
only come near you, as I was--ah, my heaven! Unhappy experiences? Yes.
But when men get women on the slope to their perdition, they have no
mercy, none. They deceive, and they lie; they are false in acts and
words; they do as much as murder. They're never hanged for it. They make
the Laws! And then they become fathers of families, and point the finger
at the "wretched creatures." They have a dozen names against women, for
one at themselves.'

'It maddens me at times to think . . . !' said Nesta, burning with the
sting of vile names.

Oh, there are bad women as well as bad men: but men have the power and
the lead, and they take advantage of it; and then they turn round and
execrate us for not having what they have robbed us of!'

'I blame women--if I may dare, at my age,' said Nesta, and her bosom
heaved. 'Women should feel for their sex; they should not allow the
names; they should go among their unhappier sisters. At the worst, they
are sisters! I am sure, that fallen cannot mean--Christ shows it does
not. He changes the tone of Scripture. The women who are made outcasts,
must be hopeless and go to utter ruin. We should, if we pretend to be
better, step between them and that. There cannot be any goodness unless
it is a practiced goodness. Otherwise it is nothing more than paint on
canvas. You speak to me of my innocence. What is it worth, if it is only
a picture and does no work to help to rescue? I fear I think most of the
dreadful names that redden and sicken us.--The Old Testament!--I have a
French friend, a Mademoiselle Louise de Seines--you should hear her: she
is intensely French, and a Roman Catholic, everything which we are not:
but so human, so wise, and so full of the pride of her sex! I love her.
It is love. She will never marry until she meets a man who has the
respect for women, for all women. We both think we cannot separate
ourselves from our sisters. She seems to me to wither men, when she
speaks of their injustice, their snares to mislead and their cruelty when
they have succeeded. She is right, it is the--brute: there is no other
word.'

'And French and good!' Mrs. Marsett ejaculated. 'My Ned reads French
novels, and he says, their women . . . . But your mademoiselle is a real
one. If she says all that, I could kneel to her, French or not. Does she
talk much about men and women?'

'Not often: we lose our tempers. She wants women to have professions; at
present they have not much choice to avoid being penniless. Poverty, and
the sight of luxury! It seems as if we produced the situation, to create
an envious thirst, and cause the misery. Things are improving for them;
but we groan at the slowness of it.'

Mrs. Marsett now declared a belief, that women were nearly quite as bad
as men. 'I don't think I could take up with a profession. Unless to be a
singer. Ah! Do you sing?'

Nesta smiled: 'Yes, I sing.'

'How I should like to hear you! My Ned's a thorough
Englishman--gentleman, you know: he cares only for sport; Shooting,
Fishing, Hunting; and Football, Cricket, Rowing, and matches. He's
immensely proud of England in those things. And such muscle he has!
though he begins to fancy his heart's rather weak. It's digestion, I tell
him. But he takes me to the Opera sometimes--Italian Opera; he can't
stand German. Down at his place in Leicestershire, he tells me, when
there 's company, he has--I'm sure you sing beautifully. When I hear
beautiful singing, even from a woman they tell tales of, upon my word,
it's true, I feel my sins all melting out of me and I'm new-made: I can't
bear Ned to speak. Would you one day, one afternoon, before the end of
next week?--it would do me such real good, you can't guess how much; if I
could persuade you! I know I'm asking something out of rules. For just
half an hour: I judge by your voice in talking. Oh! it would do me
good-good-good to hear you sing. There is a tuned piano--a cottage; I
don't think it sounds badly. You would not see any great harm in calling
on me? once!'

'No,' said Nesta. And it was her nature that projected the word. Her
awakened wits were travelling to her from a distance, and she had an
intimation of their tidings; and she could not have said what they were;
or why, for a moment, she hesitated to promise she would come. Her vision
of the reality of things was without written titles, to put the stamp of
the world on it. She felt this lady to be one encompassed and in the hug
of the elementary forces, which are the terrors to inexperienced pure
young women. But she looked at her, and dared trust those lips, those
eyes. She saw, through whatever might be the vessel, the spirit of the
woman; as the upper nobility of our brood are enabled to do in a crisis
mixed of moral aversion and sisterly sympathy, when nature cries to them,
and the scales of convention, the mud-spots of accident, even
naughtiness, even wickedness, all misfortune's issue, if we but see the
one look upward, fall away. Reason is not excluded from these blind
throbs of a blood that strikes to right the doings of the Fates. Nesta
did not err in her divination of the good and the bad incarnate beside
her, though both good and bad were behind a curtain; the latter sparing
her delicate senses, appealing to chivalry, to the simply feminine claim
on her. Reason, acting in her heart as a tongue of the flames of the
forge where we all are wrought, told her surely that the good
predominated. She had the heart which is at our primal fires when nature
speaks.