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Charlotte M. Yonge - "Grisly Grisell"

Unknown - "The Bible, King James version, Book 5: Deuteronomy"

Nathaniel Hawthorne - "Chippings With A Chisel (From Twice Told Tales)"

Talbot Mundy - "Guns of the Gods"

One of Our Conquerors, Complete

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




'You pressed my hand,' she murmured.

That certainly had said more.

'Glad to again,' he responded. It was uttered airily and was meant to be
as lightly done.

Nesta did not draw back her hand. 'I feel strong when you press it.' Her
voice wavered, and as when we hear a flask sing thin at the filling,
ceased upon evidence of a heart surcharged. How was he to relax the
pressure!--he had to give her the strength she craved: and he vowed it
should be but for half a minute, half a minute longer.

Her tears fell; she eyed him steadily; she had the look of sunlight in
shower.

'Oldish men are the best friends for you, I suppose,' he said; and her
gaze turned elusive phrases to vapour.

He was compelled to see the fiery core of the raincloud lighting it for a
revealment, that allowed as little as it retained of a shadow of
obscurity.

The sight was keener than touch and the run of blood with blood to
quicken slumbering seeds of passion.

But here is the place of broken ground and tangle, which calls to
honourable men, not bent on sport, to be wary to guard the gunlock. He
stopped the word at his mouth. It was not in him to stop or moderate the
force of his eyes. She met them with the slender unbendingness that was
her own; a feminine of inspirited manhood. There was no soft expression,
only the direct shot of light, on both sides; conveying as much as is
borne from sun to earth, from earth to sun. And when such an exchange has
come between the two, they are past plighting, they are the wedded one.

Nesta felt it, without asking whether she was loved. She was his. She had
not a thought of the word of love or the being beloved. Showers of
painful blissfulness went through her, as the tremours of a shocked
frame, while she sat quietly, showing scarce a sign; and after he had let
her hand go, she had the pressure on it. The quivering intense of the
moment of his eyes and grasp was lord of her, lord of the day and of all
days coming. That is how Love slays Death. Never did girl so give her
soul.

She would have been the last to yield it unreservedly to a man untrusted
for the character she worshipped. But she could have given it to Dartrey,
despite his love of another, because it was her soul, without any of the
cravings, except to bestow.

He perceived, that he had been carried on for the number of steps which
are countless miles and do not permit the retreat across the desert
behind; and he was in some amazement at himself, remindful of the
different nature of our restraining power when we have a couple playing
on it. Yet here was this girl, who called him up to the heights of young
life again: and a brave girl; and she bled for the weak, had no shrinking
from the women underfoot: for the reason, that she was a girl sovereignly
pure, angelically tender. Was there a point of honour to hold him back?

Nataly entered the room. She kissed Nesta, and sat silent.

'Mother, will you speak of me to him, if I go out?' Nesta said.

'We have spoken,' her mother replied, vexed by the unmaidenly allusion to
that theme.

She would have asked, How did you guess I knew of it?--but that the Why
should I speak of you to him? struck the louder note in her bosom: and
then, What is there that this girl cannot guess!--filled the mother's
heart with apprehensive dread: and an inward cry, What things will she
not set going, to have them discussed. And the appalling theme, sitting
offensive though draped in their midst, was taken for a proof of the
girl's unblushingness. After standing as one woman against the world so
long, Nataly was relieved to be on the side of a world now convictedly
unjust to her in the confounding of her with the shameless. Her mind had
taken the brand of that thought:--And Nesta had brought her to it:--And
Dudley Sowerby, a generous representative of the world, had kindly,
having the deputed power to do so, sustained her, only partially blaming
Nesta, not casting them off; as the world, with which Nataly felt, under
a sense of the protection calling up all her gratitude to young Dudley,
would have approved his doing.

She was passing through a fit of the cowardice peculiar to the tediously
strained, who are being more than commonly tried--persecuted, as they say
when they are not supplicating their tyrannical Authority for aid. The
world will continue to be indifferent to their view of it and behaviour
toward it until it ceases to encourage the growth of hypocrites.

These are moments when the faces we are observing drop their charm,
showing us our perversion internal, if we could but reflect, to see it.
Very many thousand times above Dudley Sowerby, Nataly ranked Dartrey
Fenellan; and still she looked at him, where he sat beside Nesta,
ungenially, critical of the very features, jealously in the interests of
Dudley; and recollecting, too, that she had once prayed for one exactly
resembling Dartrey Fenellan to be her Nesta's husband. But, as she would
have said, that was before the indiscretion of her girl had shown her to
require for her husband a man whose character and station guaranteed
protection instead of inciting to rebellion. And Dartrey, the loved and
prized, was often in the rebel ranks; he was dissatisfied with matters as
they are; was restless for action, angry with a country denying it to
him; he made enemies, he would surely bring down inquiries about Nesta's
head, and cause the forgotten or quiescent to be stirred; he would
scarcely be the needed hand for such a quiver of the lightnings as Nesta
was.

Dartrey read Nataly's brows. This unwonted uncomeliness of hers was an
indication to one or other of our dusky pits, not a revealing.




CHAPTER XXXIX

A CHAPTER IN THE SHADOW OF MRS. MARSETT

He read her more closely when Arlington brought in the brown paper
envelope of the wires--to which the mate of Victor ought to have become
accustomed. She took it; her eyelids closed, and her features were driven
to whiteness. 'Only these telegrams,' she said, in apology.

'Lakelands on fire?' Dartrey murmured to Nesta; and she answered: 'I
should not be sorry.'

Nataly coldly asked her why she would not be sorry.

Dartrey interposed: 'I'm sure she thinks Lakelands worries her mother.'

'That ranks low among the worries,' Nataly sighed, opening the envelope.

Nesta touched her arm: 'Mother! even before Captain Dartrey, if you will
let me!'--she turned to him: 'before . . .' at the end of her breath she
said: 'Dartrey Fenellan. You shall see my whole heart, mother.'

Her mother looked from her at him.

'Victor returns by the last train. He telegraphs, that he dines with--'
She handed the paper to Dartrey.

'Marsett,' he read aloud; and she flushed; she was angry with him for not
knowing, that the name was a term of opprobrium flung at her.

'It's to tell you he has done what he thought good,' said Dartrey. 'In
other words, as I interpret, he has completed his daughter's work. So we
won't talk about it till he comes. You have no company this evening?'

'Oh! there is a pause to-night! It's nearly as unceasing as your brother
Simeon's old French lady in the ronde with her young bridegroom, till
they danced her to pieces. I do get now and then an hour's repose,'
Nataly added, with a vision springing up of the person to whom the story
had applied.

'My dear, you are a good girl to call me Dartrey,' the owner of the name
said to Nesta.

Nataly saw them both alert, in the terrible manner peculiar to both, for
the directest of the bare statements. She could have protested, that her
love of truth was on an equality with theirs; and certainly, that her
regard for decency was livelier. Pass the deficiency in a man. But a girl
who could speak, by allusion, of Mrs. Marsett--of the existence of a Mrs.
Marsett--in the presence of a man: and he excusing, encouraging: and this
girl her own girl;--it seemed to her, that the world reeled; she could
hardly acknowledge the girl; save under the penitential admission of her
sin's having found her out.

She sent Nesta to her room when they went upstairs to dress, unable to
endure her presence after seeing her show a placid satisfaction at
Dartrey's nod to the request for him to sleep in the house that night. It
was not at all a gleam of pleasure, hardly an expression; it was a manner
of saying, One drop more in my cup of good fortune! an absurd and an
offensive exhibition of silly optimism of the young, blind that they are!

For were it known, and surely the happening of it would be known, that
Dudley Sowerby had shaken off the Nesta of no name, who was the
abominable Mrs. Marsett's friend, a whirlwind with a trumpet would sweep
them into the wilderness on a blast frightfuller than any ever heard.

Nataly had a fit of weeping for want of the girl's embrace, against whom
her door was jealously locked. She hoped those two would talk much, madly
if they liked, during dinner, that she might not be sensible, through any
short silence, of the ardour animating them: especially glowing in Nesta,
ready behind her quiet mask to come brazenly forth. But both of them were
mercilessly ardent; and a sickness of the fear, that they might fall on
her to capture her and hurry her along with them perforce of the allayed,
once fatal, inflammable element in herself, shook the warmth from her
limbs: causing her to say to herself aloud in a ragged hoarseness, very
strangely: Every thought of mine now has a physical effect on me!

They had not been two minutes together when she descended to them. Yet
she saw the girl's heart brimming, either with some word spoken to her or
for joy of an unmaidenly confession. During dinner they talked, without
distressful pauses. Whatever said, whatever done, was manifestly another
drop in Nesta's foolish happy cup. Could it be all because Dartrey
Fenellan countenanced her acquaintance with that woman? The mother had
lost hold of her. The tortured mother had lost hold of herself.

Dartrey in the course of the evening, begged to hear the contralto; and
Nataly, refusing, was astounded by the admission in her blank mind of the
truth of man's list of charges against her sex, starting from their
capriciousness for she could have sung in a crowded room, and she had now
a desire for company, for stolid company or giddy, an ocean of it. This
led to her thinking, that the world of serious money-getters, and feasts,
and the dance, the luxurious displays, and the reverential Sunday
service, will always ultimately prove itself right in opposition to
critics and rebels, and to any one vainly trying to stand alone: and the
thought annihilated her; for she was past the age of the beginning again,
and no footing was left for an outsider not self-justified in being where
she stood. She heard Dartrey's praise of Nesta's voice for tearing her
mother's bosom with notes of intolerable sweetness; and it was haphazard
irony, no doubt; we do not the less bleed for the accident of a shot.

At last, after midnight Victor arrived.

Nesta most impudently expected to be allowed to remain. 'Pray, go, dear,'
her mother said. Victor kissed his Fredi. 'Some time to-morrow,' said he;
and she forbore to beseech him.

He stared, though mildly, at sight of her taking Dartrey's hand for the
good-night and deliberately putting her lips to it.

Was she a girl whose notion of rectifying one wrong thing done, was to do
another? Nataly could merely observe. A voice pertaining to no one
present, said in her ear:--Mothers have publicly slapped their daughter's
faces for less than that!--It was the voice of her incapacity to cope
with the girl. She watched Nesta's passage from the room, somewhat
affected by the simple bearing for which she was reproaching her.

'And our poor darling has not seen a mountain this year!' Victor
exclaimed, to have mentionable grounds for pitying his girl. 'I promised
Fredi she should never count a year without Highlands or Alps. You
remember, mama?--down in the West Highlands. Fancy the dear bit of
bundle, Dartrey!--we had laid her in her bed; she was about seven or
eight; and there she lay wide awake. "What 's Fredi thinking of?"--"I'm
thinking of the tops of the mountains at night, dada."--She could climb
them now; she has the legs.'

Nataly said: 'You have some report to make. You dined with those people?'

'The Marsetts: yes:--well-suited couple enough. It's to happen before
Winter ends--at once; before Christmas; positively before next Spring.
Fredi's doing! He has to manage, arrange.--She's a good-looking woman,
good height, well-rounded; well-behaved, too: she won't make a bad Lady
Marsett. Every time that woman spoke of our girl, the tears jumped to her
eyelids.'

'Come to me before you go to bed,' Nataly said, rising, her voice
foundering; 'Good-night, Dartrey.'

She turned to the door; she could not trust herself to shake hands with
composure. Not only was it a nauseous mixture she was forced to gulp from
Victor, it burned like a poison.

'Really Fredi's doing--chiefly,' said Victor, as soon as Dartrey and he
were alone, comfortably settled in the smoking-room. 'I played the man of
pomp with Marsett--good heavy kind of creature: attached to the woman.
She's the better horse, as far as brains go. Good enough Lady Marsett. I
harped on Major Worrell: my daughter insulted. He knew of it--spoke of
you properly. The man offered all apologies; he has told the Major he is
no gentleman, not a fit associate for gentlemen:--quite so--and has cut
him dead. Will marry her, as I said, make her as worthy as he can of the
honour of my daughter's acquaintance. Rather comical grimace, when he
vowed he'd fasten the tie. He doesn't like marriage. But, he can't give
her up. And she's for patronizing the institution. But she is ready to
say good-bye to him "rather than see the truest lady in the world
insulted"--her words. And so he swallows his dose for health, and looks a
trifle sourish. Antecedents, I suppose: has to stomach them. But if a
man's fond of a woman--if he knows he saves her from slipping lower--and
it's an awful world, for us to let a woman be under its wheels:--I say, a
woman who has a man to lean on, unless she's as downright corrupt as two
or three of the men we've known:--upon my word, Dartrey, I come round to
some of your ideas on these matters. It's this girl of mine, this wee bit
of girl in her little nightshirt with the frill, astonishes me
most:--"thinking of the tops of the mountains at night!" She has
positively done the whole of this work-main part. I smiled when I left
the house, to have to own our little Fredi starting us all on the road.
It seems, Marsett had sworn he would; amorous vow, you know; he never
came nearer to doing it. I hope it's his better mind now; I do hope the
man won't have cause to regret it. He speaks of Nesta--sort of rustic
tone of awe. Mrs. Marsett has impressed him. He expects the title soon,
will leave the army--the poor plucked British army, as you call it!--and
lead the life of a country squire: hunting! Well, it's not only the army,
it's over Great Britain, with this infernal wealth of ours!--and all for
pleasure--eh?--or Paradise lost for a sugar plum! Eh, Dartrey? Upon my
word, it appears to me, Esau's the Englishman, Jacob the German, of these
times. I wonder old Colney hasn't said it. If we're not plucked, as your
regiments are of the officers who have learnt their work, we're
emasculated:--the nation's half made-up of the idle and the servants of
the idle.'

'Ay, and your country squires and your manufacturers contrive to give the
army a body of consumptive louts fit for nothing else than to take the
shilling--and not worth it,' said Dartrey.

'Sounds like old Colney,' Victor remarked to himself. 'But, believe me,
I'm ashamed of the number of servants who wait on me. It wouldn't so much
matter, as Skepsey says, if they were trained to arms and self-respect.
That little fellow Skepsey's closer to the right notion, and the right
practice, too, than any of us. With his Matilda Pridden! He has jumped
out of himself to the proper idea of women, too. And there's a man who
has been up three times before the magistrates, and is considered a
disorderly subject--one among the best of English citizens, I declare! I
never think of Skepsey without the most extraordinary, witless kind of
envy--as if he were putting in action an idea I once had and never quite
got hold of again. The match for him is Fredi. She threatens to be just
as devoted, just as simple, as he. I positively doubt whether any of us
could stop her, if she had set herself to do a thing she thought right.'

'I should not like to think our trying it possible,' said Dartrey.

'All very well, but it's a rock ahead. We shall have to alter our course,
my friend. You know, I dined with that couple, after the private twenty
minutes with Marsett: he formally propounded the invitation, as we were
close on his hour, rather late: and I wanted to make the woman happy,
besides putting a seal of cordiality on his good intentions--politic! And
subsequently I heard from her, that--you'll think nothing of it!--Fredi
promised to stand by her at the altar.'

Dartrey said, shrugging: 'She needn't do that.'

'So we may say. You're dealing with Nesta Victoria. Spare me a contest
with that girl, I undertake to manage any man or woman living.'

'When the thing to be done is thought right by her.'

'But can we always trust her judgement, my dear Dartrey?'

'In this case, she would argue, that her resolution to keep her promise
would bind or help to bind Marsett to fulfil his engagement.'

'Odd, her mother has turned dead round in favour of that fellow Dudley
Sowerby! I don't complain; it suits; but one thinks--eh?--women!'

'Well, yes, one thinks or should think, that if you insist on having
women rooted to the bed of the river, they'll veer with the tides, like
water-weeds, and no wonder.'

'Your heterodoxy on that subject is a mania, Dartrey. We can't have women
independent.'

'Then don't be exclaiming about their vagaries.'

Victor mused: 'It's wonderful: that little girl of mine!--good height
now: but what a head she has! Oh, she'll listen to reason: only mark what
I say:--with that quiet air of hers, the husband, if a young fellow, will
imagine she's the most docile of wives in the world. And as to wife, I'm
not of the contrary opinion. But qua individual female, supposing her to
have laid fast hold of an idea of duty, it's he who'll have to turn the
corner second, if they're to trot in the yoke together. Or it may be an
idea of service to a friend--or to her sex! That Mrs. Marsett says she
feels for--"bleeds" for her sex. The poor woman didn't show to advantage
with me, because she was in a fever to please:--talks in jerks, hot
phrases. She holds herself well. At the end of the dinner she behaved
better. Odd, you can teach women with hints and a lead. But Marsett 's
Marsett to the end. Rather touching!--the poor fellow said: Deuce of a
bad look-out for me if Judith doesn't have a child! First-rate sportsman,
I hear. He should have thought of his family earlier. You know, Dartrey,
the case is to be argued for the family as well. You won't listen. And
for Society too! Off you go.'

A battery was opened on that wall of composite.

'Ah, well,' said Victor. 'But I may have to beg your help, as to the
so-called promise to stand at the altar. I don't mention it upstairs.'

He went to Nataly's room.

She was considerately treated, and was aware of being dandled, that she
might have sleep.

She consented to it, in a loathing of the topic.--Those women invade
us--we cannot keep them out! was her inward cry: with a reverberation of
the unfailing accompaniment: The world holds you for one of them!

Victor tasked her too much when his perpetual readiness to doat upon his
girl for whatever she did, set him exalting Nesta's conduct. She thought:
Was Nesta so sympathetic with her mother of late by reason of a moral
insensibility to the offence?

This was her torture through the night of a labouring heart, that
travelled to one dull shock, again and again repeated:--the apprehended
sound, in fact, of Dudley Sowerby's knock at the street door. Or
sometimes a footman handed her his letter, courteously phrased to
withdraw from the alliance. Or else he came to a scene with Nesta, and
her mother was dragged into it, and the intolerable subject steamed about
her. The girl was visioned as deadly. She might be indifferent to the
protection of Dudley's name. Robust, sanguine, Victor's child, she
might--her mother listened to a devil's whisper--but no; Nesta's aim was
at the heights; she was pure in mind as in body. No, but the world would
bring the accusation; and the world would trace the cause: Heredity, it
would say. Would it say falsely? Nataly harped on the interrogation until
she felt her existence dissolving to a dark stain of the earth, and she
found herself wondering at the breath she drew, doubting that another
would follow, speculating on the cruel force which keeps us to the act of
breathing.--Though I could draw wild blissful breath if I were galloping
across the moors! her worn heart said to her youth: and out of ken of the
world, I could regain a portion of my self-esteem. Nature thereat renewed
her old sustainment with gentle murmurs, that were supported by Dr.
Themison's account of the virtuous married lady who chafed at the yoke on
behalf of her sex, and deemed the independent union the ideal. Nataly's
brain had a short gallop over moorland. It brought her face to face with
Victor's girl, and she dropped once more to her remorse in herself and
her reproaches of Nesta. The girl had inherited from her father something
of the cataract's force which won its way by catching or by mastering,
uprooting, ruining!

In the morning she was heavily asleep. Victor left word with Nesta, that
the dear mother was not to be disturbed. Consequently, when Dudley called
to see Mrs. Victor Radnor, he was informed that Miss Radnor would receive
him.

Their interview lasted an hour.

Dudley came to Victor in the City about luncheon time.

His perplexity of countenance was eloquent. He had, before seeing the
young lady, digested an immense deal more, as it seemed to him, than any
English gentleman should be asked to consume. She now referred him to her
father, who had spent a day in Brighton, and would, she said, explain
whatever there was to be explained. But she added, that if she was
expected to abandon a friend, she could not. Dudley had argued with her
upon the nature of friendship, the measurement of its various dues; he
had lectured on the choice of friends, the impossibility for young
ladies, necessarily inexperienced, to distinguish the right class of
friends, the dangers they ran in selecting friends unwarranted by the
stamp of honourable families.

'And what did Fredi say to that?' Victor inquired.

'Miss Radnor said--I may be dense, I cannot comprehend--that the precepts
were suitable for seminaries of Pharisees. When it is a question of a
young lady associating with a notorious woman!'

'Not notorious. You spoil your case if you "speak extremely," as a friend
says. I saw her yesterday. She worships "Miss Radnor."'

Nesta will know when she is older; she will thank me,' said Dudley
hurriedly. 'As it is at present, I may reckon, I hope, that the
association ceases. Her name: I have to consider my family.'

'Good anchorage! You must fight it out with the girl. And depend upon
this--you're not the poorer for being the husband of a girl of character;
unless you try to bridle her. She belongs to her time. I don't mind
owning to you, she has given me a lead.--Fredi 'll be merry to-night.
Here's a letter I have from the Sanfredini, dated Milan, fresh this
morning; invitation to bring the god-child to her villa on Como in May;
desirous to embrace her. She wrote to the office. Not a word of her
duque. She has pitched him to the winds. You may like to carry it off to
Fredi and please her.'

'I have business,' Dudley replied.

'Away to it, then!' said Victor. 'You stand by me?--we expect our South
London borough to be open in January; early next year, at least; may be
February. You have family interest there.'

'Personally, I will do my best,' Dudley said; and he escaped, feeling,
with the universal censor's angry spite, that the revolutions of the
world had made one of the wealthiest of City men the head of a set of
Bohemians. And there are eulogists of the modern time! And the man's
daughter was declared to belong to it! A visit in May to the Italian
cantatrice separated from her husband, would render the maiden an
accomplished flinger of caps over the windmills.

At home Victor discovered, that there was not much more than a truce
between Nesta and Nataly. He had a medical hint from Dr. Themison, and he
counselled his girl to humour her mother as far as could be: particularly
in relation to Dudley, whom Nataly now, womanlike, after opposing,
strongly favoured. How are we ever to get a clue to the labyrinthine
convolutions and changeful motives of the sex! Dartrey's theories were
absurd. Did Nataly think them dangerous for a young woman? The guess
hinted at a clue of some sort to the secret of her veering.