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Dom - "Rhyme And Reason A Compilation Of Verses, Rhymes And Senses"

Katharine Pyle - "The Counterpane Fairy"

Georg Ebers - "The Burgomaster's Wife, Volume 2."

Nathaniel Hawthorne - "Sketches From Memory"

One of Our Conquerors, Complete

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




Popular artists, intent to gratify the national taste for effects called
realistic, have figured in scenes of battle the raying fragments of a man
from impact of a cannon-ball on his person. Truly thus it may be when
flesh contends. But an image of the stricken and scattered mind of the
man should, though deficient in the attraction, have a greater
significance, forasmuch as it does not exhibit him entirely liquefied and
showered into space; it leaves him his legs for the taking of further
steps. Dudley, standing on the platform of Nesta's train, one half minute
too late, according to his desire before he put himself in motion, was as
wildly torn as the vapour shredded streaming to fingers and threads off
the upright columnar shot of the shriek from the boiler. He wished every
mad antagonism to his wishes: that he might see her, be blind to her;
embrace, discard; heal his wound, and tear it wider. He thanked her for
the grossness of an offence precluding excuses. He was aware of a glimmer
of advocacy in the very grossness. He conjured-up her features, and they
said, her innocence was the sinner; they scoffed at him for the dupe he
was willing to be. She had enigma's mouth, with the eyes of morning.

More than most girls, she was the girl-Sphinx to him because of her
having ideas--or what he deemed ideas. She struck a toneing warmth
through his intelligence, not dissimilar to the livelier circulation of
the blood in the frame breathing mountain air. She really helped him,
incited him to go along with this windy wild modern time more cheerfully,
if not quite hopefully. For she had been the book of Romance he despised
when it appeared as a printed volume: and which might have educated the
young man to read some among our riddles in the book of humanity. The
white he was ready to take for silver the black were all black; the
spotted had received corruption's label. Her youthful French governess
Mademoiselle de Seilles was also peculiarly enigmatic at the mouth
conversant, one might expect, with the disintegrating literature of her
country. In public, the two talked of St. Louis. One of them in secret
visits a Mrs. Marsett. The Southweare women, the Hennen women, and Lady
Evelina Reddish, were artless candid creatures in their early days, not
transgressing in a glance. Lady Grace Halley had her fit of the
devotional previous to marriage. No girl known to Dudley by report or
acquaintance had committed so scandalous an indiscretion as Miss
Radnor's: it pertained to the insolently vile.

And on that ground, it started the voluble defence. For certain suspected
things will dash suspicion to the rebound, when they are very dark. As
soon as the charge against her was moderated, the defence expired. He
heard the world delivering its judgement upon her; and he sorrowfully
acquiesced. She passed from him.

When she was cut off, she sang him in the distance a remembered saying of
hers, with the full melody of her voice. One day, treating of modern
pessimism, he had draped a cadaverous view of our mortal being in a
quotation of the wisdom of the Philosopher Emperor: 'To set one's love
upon the swallow is a futility.' And she, weighing it, nodded, and
replied: 'May not the pleasure for us remain if we set our love upon the
beauty of the swallow's flight?'

There was, for a girl, a bit of idea, real idea, in that meaning, of
course, the picture we are to have of the bird's wings in motion, it has
often been admired. Oh! not much of an idea in itself: feminine and
vague. But it was pertinent, opportune; in this way she stimulated. And
the girl who could think it, and call on a Mrs. Marsett, was of the class
of mixtures properly to be handed over to chemical experts for analysis!

She had her aspirations on behalf of her sex: she and Mademoiselle de
Seilles discussed them; women were to do this, do that:--necessarily a
means of instructing a girl to learn what they did do. If the lower part
of her face had been as reassuring to him as the upper, he might have put
a reluctant faith in the pure-mindedness of these aspirations, without
reverting to her origin, and also to recent rumours of her father and
Lady Grace Halley. As it was, he inquired of the cognizant, whether an
intellectual precocity, devoted by preference to questions affecting the
state of women, did not rather more than suggest the existence of urgent
senses likewise. She, a girl under twenty, had an interest in public
matters, and she called on a Mrs. Marsett. To plead her simplicity, was
to be absolutely ignorant of her.

He neighboured sagacity when he pointed that interrogation relating to
Nesta's precociousness of the intelligence. For, as they say in
dactylomancy, the 'psychical' of women are not disposed in their
sensitive early days to dwell upon the fortunes of their sex: a thought
or two turns them facing away, with the repugnant shiver. They worship at
a niche in the wall. They cannot avoid imputing some share of foulness to
them that are for scouring the chamber; and the civilized male, keeping
his own chamber locked, quite shares their pale taper's view. The
full-blooded to the finger-tips, on the other hand, are likely to be
drawn to the subject, by noble inducement as often as by base: Nature at
flood being the cause in either instance. This young Nature of the good
and the bad, is the blood which runs to power of heart as well as to
thirsts of the flesh. Then have men to sound themselves, to discover how
much of Nature their abstract honourable conception or representative
eidolon of young women will bear without going to pieces; and it will not
be much, unless they shall have taken instruction from the poet's pen:
for a view possibly of Nature at work to cast the slough, when they see
her writhing as in her ugliest old throes. If they have learnt of
Nature's priest to respect her, they will less distrust those rare
daughters of hers who are moved by her warmth to lift her out of slime.
It is by her own live warmth that it has to be done: cold worship at a
niche in the wall will not do it.--Well, there is an index, for the
enlargement of your charity.

But facts were Dudley's teachers. Physically, morally, mentally, he read
the world through facts; that is to say, through the facts he
encountered: and he was in consequence foredoomed to a succession of
bumps; all the heavier from his being, unlike the horned kind, not
unimpressible by the hazy things outside his experience. Even at his
darkest over Nesta, it was his indigestion of the misconduct of her
parents, which denied to a certain still small advocate within him the
right to raise a voice: that good fellow struck the attitude for
pleading, and had to be silent; for he was Instinct; at best a stammering
speaker in the Court of the wigged Facts. Instinct of this Nesta Radnor's
character would have said a brave word, but for her deeds bearing witness
to her inheritance of a lawlessly adventurous temperament.

What to do? He was no nearer to an answer when the wintry dusk had fallen
on the promenading crowds. To do nothing, is the wisdom of those who have
seen fools perish. Facts had not taught him, that the doing nothing, for
a length of days after the first shock he sustained, was the reason of
how it came that Nesta knitted closer her acquaintance with the
'agreeable lady' she mentioned in her letter to Cronidge. Those excellent
counsellors of a mercantile community gave him no warnings, that the
'masterly inactive' part, so greatly esteemed by him for the conduct of
public affairs, might be perilous in dealings with a vivid girl: nor a
hint, that when facts continue undigested, it is because the sensations
are as violent as hysterical females to block them from the
understanding. His Robin Goodfellow instinct tried to be serviceable at a
crux of his meditations, where Edith Averst's consumptive brothers waved
faded hands at her chances of inheriting largely. Superb for the chances:
but what of her offspring? And the other was a girl such as the lusty
Dame Dowager of fighting ancestors would have signalled to the heir of
the House's honours for the perpetuation of his race. No doubt: and the
venerable Dame (beautiful in her old-lace frame, or say foliage) of the
Ages backward, temp: Ed: III. inflated him with a thought of her: and his
readings in modern books on heredity, pure blood, physical regeneration,
pronounced approval of Nesta Radnor: and thereupon instinct opened mouth
to speak; and a lockjaw seized it under that scowl of his presiding
mistrust of Nature.

He clung to his mistrust the more because of a warning he had from the
silenced natural voice: somewhat as we may behold how the Conservatism of
a Class, in a world of all the evidences showing that there is no stay to
things, comes of the intuitive discernment of its finality. His mistrust
was his own; and Nesta was not; not yet; though a step would make her his
own. Instinct prompting to the step, was a worthless adviser. It spurred
him, nevertheless.

He called at the Club for his cousin Southweare, with whom he was not in
sympathy; and had information that, Southweare said, 'made the girl out
all right.' Girls in these days do things which the sainted stay-at-homes
preceding them would not have dreamed of doing. Something had occurred,
relating to Major Worrell: he withdrew Miss Radnor's name, acknowledged
himself mistaken or amended his report of her, in some way, not quite
intelligible. Dudley was accosted by Simeon Fenellan; subsequently by
Dartrey. There was gossip over the latter gentleman's having been up
before the magistrate, talk of a queer kind of stick, and Dartrey said,
laughing, to Simeon: 'Rather lucky I bled the rascal';--whatever the
meaning. She nursed one of her adorations for this man, who had
yesterday, apparently, joined in a street-fray; so she partook of the
stain of the turbid defacing all these disorderly people.

At his hotel at breakfast the next morning, a newspaper furnished an
account of Captain Dartrey Fenellan's participation in the strife, after
mention of him as nephew of the Earl of Clanconan, 'now a visitor to our
town'; and his deeds were accordant with his birth. Such writing was
enough to send Dudley an eager listener to Colney Durance. What a people!

Mr. Dartrey Fenellan's card compelled Dudley presently to receive him.

Dartrey, not debarred by considerations, that an allusion to Miss Radnor
could be conveyed only in the most delicately obscure manner, spared him
no more than the plain English of his relations with her. Requested to
come to the Club, at a certain hour of the afternoon, that he might hear
Major Worrell's personal contradiction of scandal involving the young
lady's name, together with his apology, etc., Dudley declined: and he was
obliged to do it curtly; words were wanting. They are hard to find for
wounded sentiments rendered complex by an infusion of policy. His present
mood, with the something new to digest, held the going to Major Worrell a
wrong step; he behaved as if the speaking to Dartrey Fenellan pledged him
hardly less. And besides he had a physical abhorrence, under dictate of
moral reprobation, of the broad-shouldered sinewy man, whose look of wiry
alertness pictured the previous day's gory gutters.

Dartrey set sharp eyes on him for an instant, bowed; and went.




CHAPTER XXXVI

NESTA AND HER FATHER

The day of Nesta's return was one of a number of late when Victor was
robbed of his walk Westward by Lady Grace Halley, who seduced his
politeness with her various forms of blandishment to take a seat in her
carriage; and she was a practical speaker upon her quarter of the world
when she had him there. Perhaps she was right in saying--though she had
no right to say--that he and she together might have the world under
their feet. It was one of those irritating suggestions which expedite us
up to a bald ceiling, only to make us feel the gas-bladder's tight
extension upon emptiness: It moved him to examine the poor value of his
aim, by tying him to the contemptible means: One estimate involved the
other, whichever came first. Somewhere he had an idea, that would lift
and cleanse all degradations. But it did seem as if he were not enjoying:
things pleasant enough in the passage of them were barren, if not
prickly, in the retrospect.

He sprang out at the head of the park, for a tramp round it, in the gloom
of the girdle of lights, to recover his deadened relish of the thin
phantasmal strife to win an intangible prize. His dulled physical system
asked, as with the sensations of a man at the start from sleep in the
hurrying grip of steam, what on earth he wanted to get, and what was the
substance of his gains: what! if other than a precipitous intimacy, a
deep crumbling over deeper, with a little woman amusing him in remarks of
a whimsical nudity; hardly more. Nay, not more! he said; and at the end
of twenty paces, he saw much more; the campaign gathered a circling
suggestive brilliancy, like the lamps about the winter park; the Society,
lured with glitter, hooked by greed, composed a ravishing picture; the
little woman was esteemed as a serviceable lieutenant; and her hand was a
small soft one, agreeable to fondle--and avaunt! But so it is in war: we
must pay for our allies. What if it had been, that he and she together,
with their united powers . . . ? He dashed the silly vision aside, as
vainer than one of the bubble-empires blown by boys; and it broke,
showing no heart in it. His heart was Nataly's.

Let Colney hint his worst; Nataly bore the strain, always did bear any
strain coming in the round of her duties: and if she would but walk, or
if she danced at parties, she would scatter the fits of despondency
besetting the phlegmatic, like this day's breeze the morning fog; or as
he did with two minutes of the stretch of legs.

Full of the grandeur of that black pit of the benighted London, with its
ocean-voice of the heart at beat along the lighted outer ring, Victor
entered at his old door of the two houses he had knocked into one: a
surprise for Fredi!--and heard that his girl had arrived in the morning.

'And could no more endure her absence from her Mammy O!' The songful
satirical line spouted in him, to be flung at his girl, as he ran
upstairs to the boudoir off the drawing-room.

He peeped in. It was dark. Sensible of presences, he gradually discerned
a thick blot along the couch to the right of the door, and he drew near.
Two were lying folded together; mother and daughter. He bent over them.
His hand was taken and pressed by Fredi's; she spoke; she said tenderly:
'Father.' Neither of the two made a movement. He heard the shivering rise
of a sob, that fell. The dry sob going to the waste breath was Nataly's.
His girl did not speak again.

He left them. He had no thought until he stood in his dressing-room, when
he said 'Good!' For those two must have been lying folded together during
the greater part of the day: and it meant, that the mother's heart had
opened; the girl knew. Her tone: 'Father,' sweet, was heavy, too, with
the darkness it came out of.

So she knew. Good. He clasped them both in his heart; tempering his pity
of those dear ones with the thought, that they were of the sex which
finds enjoyment in a day of the mutual tear; and envying them; he
strained at a richness appearing in the sobs of their close union.

All of his girl's loving soul flew to her mother; and naturally: She
would not be harsh on her father. She would say he loved! And true: he
did love, he does love; loves no woman but the dear mother.

He flicked a short wring of the hand having taken pressure from an alien
woman's before Fredi pressed it, and absolved himself in the act;
thinking, How little does a woman know how true we can be to her when we
smell at a flower here and there!--There they are, stationary; women the
flowers, we the bee; and we are faithful in our seeming volatility;
faithful to the hive!--And if women are to be stationary, the reasoning
is not so bad. Funny, however, if they here and there imitatively spread
a wing, and treat men in that way? It is a breach of the convention; we
pay them our homage, that they may serve as flowers, not to be volatile
tempters. Nataly never had been one of the sort: Lady Grace was. No
necessity existed for compelling the world to bow to Lady Grace, while on
behalf of his Nataly he had to . . . Victor closed the curtain over a
gulf-revealed by an invocation of Nature, and showing the tremendous
force he partook of so largely, in her motive elements of the devourer.
Horrid to behold, when we need a gracious presentation of the
circumstances. She is a splendid power for as long as we confine her
between the banks: but she has a passion to discover cracks; and if we
give her headway, she will find one, and drive at it, and be through,
uproarious in her primitive licentiousness, unless we labour body and
soul like Dutchmen at the dam. Here she was, and not desired, almost
detested! Nature detested! It had come about through the battle for
Nataly; chiefly through Mrs. Burman's tenacious hold of the filmy thread
she took for life and was enabled to use as a means for the perversion
besides bar to the happiness of creatures really living. We may well
marvel at the Fates, and tell them they are not moral agents!

Victor's reflections came across Colney Durance, who tripped and stopped
them.

Dressed with his customary celerity, he waited for Nesta, to show her the
lighted grand double drawing-room: a further proof of how Fortune
favoured him: she was to be told, how he one day expressed a wish for
greater space, and was informed on the next, that the neighbour house was
being vacated, and the day following he was in treaty for the purchase of
it; returning from Tyrol, he found his place habitable.

Nesta came. Her short look at him was fond, her voice not faltering; she
laid her hand under his arm and walked round the spacious room, praising
the general design, admiring the porcelain, the ferns, friezes, hangings,
and the grand piano, the ebony inlaid music-stands, the firegrates and
plaques, the ottomans, the tone of neutral colour that, as in sound,
muted splendour. He told her it was a reception night, with music: and
added: 'I miss my . . . seen anybody lately?'

'Mr. Sowerby?' said she. 'He was to have escorted me back. He may have
overslept himself.'

She spoke it plainly; when speaking of the dear good ladies, she set a
gentle humour at play, and comforted him, as she intended, with a
souvenir of her lively spirit, wanting only in the manner of gaiety.

He allowed, that she could not be quite gay.

More deeply touched the next minute, he felt in her voice, in her look,
in her phrasing of speech, an older, much older daughter than the Fredi
whom he had conducted to Moorsedge. 'Kiss me,' he said.

She turned to him full-front, and kissed his right cheek and left, and
his forehead, saying: 'My love! my papa! my own dear dada!' all the words
of her girlhood in her new sedateness; and smiling: like the moral
crepuscular of a sunlighted day down a not totally inanimate Sunday
Londen street.

He strained her to his breast. 'Mama soon be here?'

'Soon.'

That was well. And possibly at the present moment applying, with her
cunning hand, the cosmetics and powders he could excuse for a concealment
of the traces of grief.

Satisfied in being a superficial observer, he did not spy to see more
than the world would when Nataly entered the dining-room at the quiet
family dinner. She performed her part for his comfort, though not
prattling; and he missed his Fredi's delicious warble of the prattle
running rill-like over our daily humdrum. Simeon Fenellan would have
helped. Then suddenly came enlivenment: a recollection of news in the
morning's paper. 'No harm before Fredi, my dear. She's a young woman now.
And no harm, so to speak-at least, not against the Sanfredini. She has
donned her name again, and a villa on Como, leaving her
'duque';--paragraph from a Milanese musical Journal; no particulars. Now,
mark me, we shall have her at Lakelands in the Summer. If only we could
have her now!'

'It would be a pleasure,' said Nataly. Her heart had a blow in the
thought, that a lady of this kind would create the pleasure by not
bringing criticism.

'The godmother?' he glistened upon Nesta.

She gave him low half-notes of the little blue butterfly's imitation of
the superb contralto; and her hand and head at turn to hint the
theatrical operatic attitude.

'Delicious!' he cried, his eyelids were bedewed at the vision of the
three of them planted in the past; and here again, out of the dark wood,
where something had required to be said, and had been said; and all was
happily over, owing to the goodness and sweetness of the two dear
innocents;--whom heaven bless! Jealousy of their naturally closer
heart-at-heart, had not a whisper for him; part of their goodness and
sweetness was felt to be in the not excluding him.

Nesta engaged to sing one of the 'old duets with her mother. She saw her
mother's breast lift in a mechanical effort to try imaginary notes, as if
doubtful of her capacity, more at home in the dumb deep sigh they fell
to. Her mother's heroism made her a sacred woman to the thoughts of the
girl, overcoming wonderment at the extreme submissiveness.

She put a screw on her mind to perceive the rational object there might
be for causing her mother to go through tortures in receiving and
visiting; and she was arrested by the louder question, whether she could
think such a man as her father irrational.

People with resounding names, waves of a steady stream, were announced by
Arlington, just as in the days, that seemed remote, before she went to
Moorsedge; only they were more numerous, and some of the titles had
ascended a stage. There were great lords, there were many great ladies;
and Lady Grace Halley shuffling amid them, like a silken shimmer in
voluminous robes.

They crowded about their host where he stood. 'He, is their Law!' Colney
said, speaking unintelligibly, in the absence of the Simeon Fenellan
regretted so loudly by Mr. Beaves Urmsing. They had an air of
worshipping, and he of swimming.

There were also City magnates, and Lakelands' neighbours: the gentleman
representing Pride of Port, Sir Abraham Quatley; and Colonel Corfe; Sir
Rodwell and Lady Blachington; Mrs. Fanning; Mr. Caddis. Few young men and
maids were seen. Dr. John Cormyn came without his wife, not mentioning
her. Mrs. Peter Yatt touched the notes for voices at the piano. Priscilla
Graves was a vacancy, and likewise the Rev. Septimus Barmby. Peridon and
Catkin, and Mr. Pempton took their usual places. There was no fluting. A
famous Canadian lady was the principal singer. A Galician violinist,
zig-zagging extreme extensions and contractions of his corporeal frame in
execution, and described by Colney as 'Paganini on wall,' failed to
supplant Durandarte in Nesta's memory. She was asked by Lady Grace for
the latest of Dudley. Sir Abraham Quatley named him with handsome
emphasis. Great dames caressed her; openly approved; shadowed the future
place among them.

Victor alluded at night to Mrs. John Cormyn's absence. He said: 'A
homoeopathic doctor's wife!' nothing more; and by that little, he
prepared Nesta for her mother's explanation. The great London people,
ignorant or not, were caught by the strong tide he created, and carried
on it. But there was a bruiting of the secret among their set; and the
one to fall away from her, Nataly marvellingly named Mrs. John Cormyn;
whose marriage was of her making. She did not disapprove Priscilla's
behaviour. Priscilla had come to her and, protesting affection, had
openly stated, that she required time and retirement to recover her
proper feelings. Nataly smiled a melancholy criticism of an inconsequent
or capricious woman, in relating to Nesta certain observations Priscilla
had dropped upon poor faithful Mr. Pempton, because of his concealment
from her of his knowledge of things for this faithful gentleman had been
one of the few not ignorant. The rumour was traceable to the City.

'Mother, we walk on planks,' Nesta said.

Nataly answered: 'You will grow used to it.'

Her mother's habitual serenity in martyrdom was deceiving. Nesta had a
transient suspicion, that she had grown, from use, to like the whirl of
company, for oblivion in the excitement; and as her remembrance of her
own station among the crowding people was a hot flush, the difference of
their feelings chilled her.

Nataly said: 'It is to-morrow night again; we do not rest.' She smiled;
and at once the girl read woman's armour on the dear face, and asked
herself, Could I be so brave? The question following was a speechless
wave, that surged at her father. She tried to fathom the scheme he
entertained. The attempt obscured her conception of the man he was. She
could not grasp him, being too young for knowing, that young heads cannot
obtain a critical hold upon one whom they see grandly succeeding it is
the sun's brilliance to their eyes.