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Ben Jonson - "Epicoene: Or, The Silent Woman"

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One of Our Conquerors, Complete

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




'Mr. Sowerby left me with an adieu,' said Nesta.

'Mr. Sowerby! My dear, he is bound, bound in honour, bound at heart. You
did not dismiss him?'

'I repeated the word he used. I thought of mother. The blood leaves her
cheeks at a disappointment now. She has taken to like him.'

'Why, you like him!'

'I could not vow.'

'Tush.'

'Ah, don't press me, dada. But you will see, he has disengaged himself.'

He had done it, though not in formal speech. Slow digestion of his native
antagonism to these Bohemians, to say nothing of his judicial
condemnation of them, brought him painfully round to the writing of a
letter to Nataly; cunningly addressed to the person on whom his instinct
told him he had the strongest hold.

She schooled herself to discuss the detested matter forming Dudley's
grievance and her own with Nesta; and it was a woeful half-hour for them.
But Nataly was not the weeper.

Another interview ensued between Nesta and her suitor. Dudley bore no
resemblance to Mr. Barmby, who refused to take the word no from her, and
had taken it, and had gone to do holy work, for which she revered him.
Dudley took the word, leaving her to imagine freedom, until once more her
mother or her father, inspired by him, came interceding, her mother
actually supplicating. So that the reality of Dudley's love rose to
conception like a London dawn over Nesta; and how, honourably, decently,
positively, to sever herself from it, grew to be an ill-visaged problem.
She glanced in soul at Dartrey Fenellan for help; she had her wild
thoughts. Having once called him Dartrey, the virginal barrier to
thoughts was broken; and but for love of her father, for love and pity of
her mother, she would have ventured the step to make the man who had her
whole being in charge accept or reject her. Nothing else appeared in
prospect. Her father and mother were urgently one to favour Dudley; and
the sensitive gentleman presented himself to receive his wound and to
depart with it. But always he returned. At last, as if under tuition, he
refrained from provoking a wound; he stood there to win her upon any
terms; and he was a handsome figure, acknowledged by the damsel to be
increasing in good looks as more and more his pretensions became
distasteful to her. The slight cast of sourness on his lower features had
almost vanished, his nature seemed to have enlarged. He complimented her
for her 'generous benevolence,' vaguely, yet with evident sincereness; he
admitted, that the modern world is 'attempting difficulties with at least
commendable intentions'; and that the position of women demands
improvement, consideration for them also. He said feelingly: 'They have
to bear extraordinary burdens!' There he stopped.

The sharp intelligence fronting him understood, that this compassionate
ejaculation was the point where she, too, must cry halt. He had,
however--still under tuition, perhaps--withdrawn his voice from the
pursuit of her; and so she in gratitude silenced her critical mind
beneath a smooth conceit of her having led him two steps to a broader
tolerance. Susceptible as she was, she did not influence him without
being affected herself in other things than her vanity: his prudishness
affected her. Only when her heart flamed did she disdain that real haven
of refuge, with its visionary mount of superiority, offered by Society to
its effect, in the habit of ignoring the sins it fosters under
cloak;--not less than did the naked barbaric time, and far more to the
vitiation of the soul. He fancied he was moulding her; therefore winning
her. It followed, that he had the lover's desire for assurance of
exclusive possession; and reflecting, that he had greatly pardoned, he
grew exacting. He mentioned his objections to some of Mr. Dartrey
Fenellan's ideas.

Nesta replied: 'I have this morning had two letters to make me happy.'

A provoking evasion. He would rather have seen antagonism bridle and
stiffen her figure. 'Is one of them from that gentleman?'

'One is from my dear friend Louise de Seilles. She comes to me early next
month.'

'The other?'

'The other is also from a friend.'

'A dear friend?'

'Not so dear. Her letter gives me happiness.'

'She writes--not from France: from . . . ? you tempt me to guess.'

'She writes to tell me, that Mr. Dartrey Fenellan has helped her in a way
to make her eternally thankful.'

'The place she writes from is . . . ?'

The drag of his lips betrayed his enlightenment insisted on doubting. He
demanded assurance.

'It matters in no degree,' she said.

Dudley 'thought himself excusable for inquiring.'

She bowed gently.

The stings and scorpions and degrading itches of this nest of wealthy
Bohemians enraged him.

'Are you--I beg to ask--are you still:--I can hardly think it--Nesta!--I
surely have a claim to advise:--it cannot be with your mother's
consent:--in communication, in correspondence with . . . ?'

Again she bowed her head; saying: 'It is true.'

'With that person?'

He could not but look the withering disgust of the modern world in a
conservative gentleman who has been lured to go with it a little way,
only to be bitten. 'I decline to believe it,' he said with forcible
sound.

'She is married,' was the rather shameless, exasperating answer.

'Married or not!' he cried, and murmured: 'I have borne--. These may be
Mr. Dartrey Fenellan's ideas; they are not mine. I have--Something at
least is due to me: Ask any lady:--there are clergymen, I know, clergymen
who are for uplifting--quite right, but not associating:--to call one of
them a friend! Ask any lady, any! Your mother . . .'

'I beg you will not distress my mother,' said Nesta.

'I beg to know whether this correspondence is to continue?' said Dudley.

'All my life, if I do not feel dishonoured by it.'

'You are.' He added hastily: 'Counsels of prudence--there is not a lady
living who would tell you otherwise. At all events, in public opinion, if
it were known--and it would certainly be known,--a lady, wife or
spinster, would suffer--would not escape the--at least shadow of
defilement from relationship, any degree of intimacy with . . . hard
words are wholesome in such a case: "touch pitch," yes! My sense is
coherent.'

'Quite,' said Nesta.

'And you do not agree with me?'

'I do not.'

'Do you pretend to be as able to judge as I?'

'In this instance, better.'

'Then I retire. I cannot retain my place here. You may depend upon it,
the world is not wrong when it forbids young ladies to have cognizance of
women leading disorderly lives.'

'Only the women, Mr. Sowerby?'

'Men, too, of course.'

'You do not exclude the men from Society.'

'Oh! one reads that kind of argument in books.'

'Oh! the worthy books, then. I would read them, if I could find them.'

'They are banned by self-respecting readers.'

'It grieves me to think differently.'

Dudley looked on this fair girl, as yet innocent girl; and contrasting
her with the foulness of the subject she dared discuss, it seemed to him,
that a world which did not puff at her and silence, if not extinguish,
was in a state of liquefaction.

Remembering his renewed repentances his absence, he said: 'I do hope you
may come to see, that the views shared by your mother and me are not
erroneous.'

'But do not distress her,' Nesta implored him. 'She is not well. When she
has grown stronger, her kind heart will move her to receive the lady, so
that she may not be deprived of the society of good women. I shall hope
she will not disapprove of me. I cannot forsake a friend.'

'I beg to say good-bye,' said Dudley.

She had seen a rigidity smite him as she spoke; and so little startling
was it, that she might have fancied it expected, save for her knowing
herself too serious to have played at wiles to gain her ends.

He 'wished her prudent advisers.'

She thanked him. 'In a few days, Louise de Seilles will be here.'

A Frenchwoman and Papist! was the interjection of his twist of brows.

Surely I must now be free? she thought when he had covered his farewell
under a salutation regretful in frostiness.

A week later, she had the embrace of her Louise, and Armandine was made
happy with a piece of Parisian riband.

Winter was rapidly in passage: changes were visible everywhere; Earth and
House of Commons and the South London borough exhibited them; Mrs. Burman
was the sole exception. To the stupefaction of physicians, in a manner to
make a sane man ask whether she was not being retained as an instrument
for one of the darker purposes of Providence--and where are we standing
if we ask such things?--she held on to her thread of life.

February went by. And not a word from Themison; nor from Carling, nor
from the Rev. Groseman Buttermore, nor from Jarniman. That is to say, the
two former accepted invitations to grand dinners; the two latter
acknowledged contributions to funds in which they were interested; but
they had apparently grown to consider Mrs. Burman as an establishment,
one of our fixtures. On the other hand, there was nothing to be feared
from her. Lakelands feared nothing: the entry into Lakelands was decreed
for the middle of April. Those good creatures enclosed the poor woman and
nourished her on comfortable fiction. So the death of the member for the
South London borough (fifteen years younger than the veteran in maladies)
was not to be called premature, and could by no possibility lead to an
exposure of the private history of the candidate for his vacant seat.




CHAPTER XL

AN EXPIATION

Nataly had fallen to be one of the solitary who have no companionship
save with the wound they nurse, to chafe it rather than try at healing.
So rational a mind as she had was not long in outliving mistaken
impressions; she could distinguish her girl's feeling, and her aim; she
could speak on the subject with Dartrey; and still her wound bled on.
Louise de Seilles comforted her partly, through an exaltation of Nesta.
Mademoiselle, however, by means of a change of tone and look when Dudley
Sowerby and Dartrey Fenellan were the themes, showed a too pronounced
preference of the more unstable one:--or rather, the man adventurous out
of the world's highways, whose image, as husband of such a daughter as
hers, smote the wounded mother with a chillness. Mademoiselle's
occasional thrill of fervency in an allusion to Dartrey, might have
tempted a suspicious woman to indulge suppositions, accounting for the
young Frenchwoman's novel tenderness to England, of which Nesta proudly,
very happily boasted. The suspicion proposed itself, and was rejected:
for not even the fever of an insane body could influence Nataly's
generous character, to let her moods divert and command her thoughts of
persons.

Her thoughts were at this time singularly lucid upon everything about
her; with the one exception of the reason why she had come to favour
Dudley, and how it was she had been smitten by that woman at Brighton to
see herself in her position altogether with the world's relentless,
unexamining hard eyes. Bitterness added, of Mrs. Marsett: She is made an
honest woman!--And there was a strain of the lower in Nataly, to reproach
the girl for causing the reflection to be cast on the unwedded. Otherwise
her mind was open; she was of aid to Victor in his confusion over some
lost Idea he had often touched on latterly. And she was the one who sent
him ahead at a trot under a light, by saying: 'You would found a new and
more stable aristocracy of the contempt of luxury' when he talked of
combatting the Jews with a superior weapon. That being, in fact, as
Colney Durance had pointed out to him, the weapon of self-conquest used
by them 'before they fell away to flesh-pottery.' Was it his Idea? He
fancied an aching at the back of his head when he speculated. But his
Idea had been surpassingly luminous, alive, a creation; and this came
before him with the yellow skin of a Theory, bred, born of books. Though
Nataly's mention of the aristocracy of self-denying discipline struck a
Lucifer in his darkness.

Nesta likewise helped: but more in what she did than in what she said:
she spoke intelligently enough to make him feel a certain increase of
alarm, amounting to a cursory secret acknowledgement of it, both at her
dealings with Dudley and with himself. She so quietly displaced the lady
visiting him at the City offices. His girl's disregard of hostile
weather, and her company, her talk, delighted him: still he remonstrated,
at her coming daily. She came: nor was there an instigation on the part
of her mother, clearly none: her mother asked him once whether he thought
she met the dreadful Brighton woman. His Fredi drove constantly to walk
back beside him Westward, as he loved to do whenever it was practicable;
and exceeding the flattery of his possession of the gallant daughter, her
conversation charmed him to forget a disappointment caused by the defeat
and entire exclusion of the lady visiting him so complimentarily for his
advice on stocks, shares, mines, et caetera. The lady resisted; she was
vanquished, as the shades are displaced by simple apparition of daylight.

His Fredi was like the daylight to him; she was the very daylight to his
mind, whatsoever their theme of converse for by stimulating that ready
but vagrant mind to quit the leash of the powerful senses and be a
ethereally excursive, she gave him a new enjoyment; which led to
reflections--a sounding of Nature, almost a question to her, on the verge
of a doubt. Are we, in fact, harmonious with the Great Mother when we
yield to the pressure of our natures for indulgence? Is she, when
translated into us, solely the imperious appetite? Here was Fredi, his
little Fredi--stately girl that she had grown, and grave, too, for all
her fun and her sail on wings--lifting him to pleasures not followed by
clamorous, and perfectly satisfactory, yet discomposingly violent,
appeals to Nature. They could be vindicated. Or could they, when they
would not bear a statement of the case? He could not imagine himself
stating it namelessly to his closest friend--not to Simeon Fenellan. As
for speaking to Dartrey, the notion took him with shivers:--Young Dudley
would have seemed a more possible confidant:--and he represented the
Puritan world.--And young Dudley was getting over Fredi's infatuation for
the woman she had rescued: he was beginning to fancy he saw a right
enthusiasm in it;--in the abstract; if only the fair maid would drop an
unseemly acquaintance. He had called at the office to say so. Victor
stammered the plea for him.

'Never, dear father,' came the smooth answer: a shocking answer in
contrast with the tones. Her English was as lucid as her eyes when she
continued up to the shock she dealt: 'Do not encourage a good man to
waste his thoughts upon me. I have chosen my mate, and I may never marry
him. I do not know whether he would marry me. He has my soul. I have no
shame in saying I love him. It is to love goodness, greatness of heart.
He is a respecter of women--of all women; not only the fortunate. He is
the friend of the weaker everywhere. He has been proved in fire. He does
not sentimentalize over poor women, as we know who scorns people for
doing:--and that is better than hardness, meaning kindly. He is not one
of the unwise advocates. He measures the forces against them. He reads
their breasts. He likes me. He is with me in my plans. He has not said,
has not shown, he loves me. It is too high a thought for me until I hear
it.'

'Has your soul!' was all that Victor could reply, while the whole
conception of Lakelands quaked under the crumbling structure.

Remonstrance, argument, a word for Dudley, swelled to his lips and sank
in dumbness. Her seeming intuition--if it was not a perception--of the
point where submission to the moods of his nature had weakened his
character, and required her defence of him, struck Victor with a serious
fear of his girl: and it was the more illuminatingly damnatory for being
recognized as the sentiment which no father should feel. He tried to
think she ought not to be so wise of the things of the world. An effort
to imagine a reproof, showed him her spirit through her eyes: in her
deeds too: she had already done work on the road:--Colney Durance,
Dartrey Fenellan, anything but sentimentalists either of them, strongly
backing her, upholding her. Victor could no longer so naturally name her
Fredi.

He spoke it hastily, under plea of some humorous tenderness, when he
ventured. When Dudley, calling on him in the City to discuss the
candidature for the South London borough, named her Fredi, that he might
regain a vantage of familiarity by imitating her father, it struck Victor
as audacious. It jarred in his recollection, though the heir of the
earldom spoke in the tone of a lover, was really at high pitch. He
appeared to be appreciating her, to have suffered stings of pain; he
offered himself; he made but one stipulation. Victor regretfully assured
him, he feared he could do nothing. The thought of his entry into
Lakelands, with Nesta Victoria refusing the foundation stone of the
place, grew dim.

But he was now canvassing for the Borough, hearty at the new business as
the braced swimmer on seas, which instantly he became, with an end in
view to be gained.

Late one April night, expecting Nataly to have gone to bed, and Nesta to
be waiting for him, he reached home, and found Nataly in her sitting-room
alone. 'Nesta was tired,' she said: 'we have had a scene; she refuses Mr.
Sowerby; I am sick of pressing it; he is very much in earnest, painfully;
she blames him for disturbing me; she will not see the right course:--a
mother reads her daughter! If my girl has not guidance!--she means
rightly, she is rash.'

Nataly could not utter all that her insaneness of feeling made her think
with regard to Victor's daughter--daughter also of the woman whom her
hard conscience accused of inflammability. 'Here is a note from Dr.
Themison, dear.'

Victor seized it, perused, and drew the big breath.

'From Themison,' he said; he coughed.

'Don't think to deceive me,' said she. 'I have not read the contents, I
know them.'

'The invitation at last, for to-morrow, Sunday, four P.M. Odd, that next
day at eight of the evening I shall be addressing our meeting in the
Theatre. Simeon speaks. Beaves Urmsing insists on coming, Tory though he
is. Those Tories are jollier fellows than--well, no wonder! There will be
no surgical . . . the poor woman is very low. A couple of days at the
outside. Of course, I go.'

'Hand me the note, dear.'

It had to be given up, out of the pocket.

'But,' said Victor, 'the mention of you is merely formal.'

She needed sleep: she bowed her head.

Nataly was the first at the breakfast-table in the morning, a fair Sunday
morning. She was going to Mrs. John Cormyn's Church, and she asked Nesta
to come with her.

She returned five minutes before the hour of lunch, having left Nesta
with Mrs. John. Louise de Seilles undertook to bring Nesta home at the
time she might choose. Fenellan, Mr. Pempton, Peridon and Catkin, lunched
and chatted. Nataly chatted. At a quarter to three o'clock Victor's
carriage was at the door. He rose: he had to keep an appointment. Nataly
said to him publicly: 'I come too.' He stared and nodded. In the
carriage, he said: 'I'm driving to the Gardens, for a stroll, to have a
look at the beasts. Sort of relief. Poor crazy woman! However, it 's a
comfort to her: so . . . !'

'I like to see them,' said Nataly. 'I shall see her. I have to do it.'

Up to the gate of the Gardens Victor was arguing to dissuade his dear
soul from this very foolish, totally unnecessary, step. Alighting, he put
the matter aside, for good angels to support his counsel at the final
moment.

Bears, lions, tigers, eagles, monkeys: they suggested no more than he
would have had from prints; they sprang no reflection, except, that the
coming hour was a matter of indifference to them. They were about him,
and exercised so far a distraction. He took very kindly to an old mother
monkey, relinquishing her society at sight of Nataly's heave of the
bosom. Southward, across the park, the dread house rose. He began quoting
Colney Durance with relish while sarcastically confuting the cynic, who
found much pasture in these Gardens. Over Southward, too, he would be
addressing a popular assembly to-morrow evening. Between now and then
there was a ditch to jump. He put on the sympathetic face of grief.
'After all, a caged wild beast hasn't so bad a life,' he said.--To be
well fed while they live, and welcome death as a release from the
maladies they develop in idleness, is the condition of wealthy
people:--creatures of prey? horrible thought! yet allied to his Idea, it
seemed. Yes, but these good caged beasts here set them an example, in not
troubling relatives and friends when they come to the gasp! Mrs. Burman's
invitation loomed as monstrous--a final act of her cruelty. His skin
pricked with dews. He thought of Nataly beside him, jumping the ditch
with him, as a relief--if she insisted on doing it. He hoped she would
not, for the sake of her composure.

It was a ditch void of bottom. But it was a mere matter of an hour, less.
The state of health of the invalid could bear only a few minutes. In any
case, we are sure that the hour will pass. Our own arrive? Certainly.

'Capital place for children,' he exclaimed. And here startlingly before
him in the clusters of boys and girls, was the difference between young
ones and their elders feeling quite as young: the careless youngsters
have not to go and sit in the room with a virulent old woman, and express
penitence and what not, and hear words of pardon, after their holiday
scamper and stare at the caged beasts.

Attention to the children precipitated him upon acquaintances, hitherto
cleverly shunned. He nodded them off, after the brightest of greetings.

Such anodyne as he could squeeze from the incarcerated wild creatures,
was exhausted. He fell to work at Nataly's 'aristocracy of the contempt
of luxury'; signifying, that we the wealthy will not exist to pamper
flesh, but we live for the promotion of brotherhood:--ay, and that our
England must make some great moral stand, if she is not to fall to the
rear and down. Unuttered, it caught the skirts of the Idea: it evaporated
when spoken. Still, this theme was almost an exorcism of Mrs. Burman. He
consulted his watch. 'Thirteen minutes to four. I must be punctual,' he
said. Nataly stepped faster.

Seated in the carriage, he told her he had never felt the horror of that
place before. 'Put me down at the corner of the terrace, dear: I won't
drive to the door.'

'I come with you, Victor,' she replied.

After entreaties and reasons intermixed, to melt her resolve, he saw she
was firm: and he asked himself, whether he might not be constitutionally
better adapted to persuade than to dissuade. The question thumped. Having
that house of drugs in view, he breathed more freely for the prospect of
feeling his Nataly near him beneath the roof.

'You really insist, dear love?' he appealed to her: and her answer: 'It
must be,' left no doubt: though he chose to say: 'Not because of standing
by me?' And she said: 'For my peace, Victor.' They stepped to the
pavement. The carriage was dismissed.

Seventeen houses of the terrace fronting the park led to the funereal
one: and the bell was tolled in the breast of each of the couple
advancing with an air of calmness to the inevitable black door.

Jarniman opened it. 'His mistress was prepared to see them.'--Not like
one near death.--They were met in the hall by the Rev. Groseman
Buttermore. 'You will find a welcome,' was his reassurance to them:
gently delivered, on the stoop of a large person. His whispered tones
were more agreeably deadening than his words.

Mr. Buttermore ushered them upstairs.

'Can she bear it?' Victor said, and heard: 'Her wish ten minutes.'

'Soon over,' he murmured to Nataly, with a compassionate exclamation for
the invalid.

They rounded the open door. They were in the drawing-room. It was
furnished as in the old time, gold and white, looking new; all the same
as of old, save for a division of silken hangings; and these were pale
blue: the colour preferred by Victor for a bedroom. He glanced at the
ceiling, to bathe in a blank space out of memory. Here she lived,--here
she slept, behind the hangings. There was refreshingly that little
difference in the arrangement of the room. The corner Northward was
occupied by the grand piano; and Victor had an inquiry in him:--tuned? He
sighed, expecting a sight to come through the hangings. Sensible that
Nataly trembled, he perceived the Rev. Groseman Buttermore half across a
heap of shawl-swathe on the sofa.

Mrs. Burman was present; seated. People may die seated; she had always
disliked the extended posture; except for the night's rest, she used to
say; imagining herself to be not inviting the bolt of sudden death, in
her attitude when seated by day:--and often at night the poor woman had
to sit up for the qualms of her dyspepsia!--But I 'm bound to think
humanely, be Christian, be kind, benignant, he thought, and he fetched
the spirit required, to behold her face emerge from a pale blue silk
veiling; as it were, the inanimate wasted led up from the mould by
morning.