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Samuel Butler - "Essays on Life, Art and Science"

Lord Byron - "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage"

Nathaniel Hawthorne - "Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete"

Gilbert Parker - "Pierre And His People, [Tales of the Far North], Volume 2."

One of Our Conquerors, Complete

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




Mr. Buttermore signalled to them to draw near.

Wasted though it was, the face of the wide orbits for sunken eyes was
distinguishable as the one once known. If the world could see it and
hear, that it called itself a man's wife! She looked burnt out.

Two chairs had been sent to front the sofa. Execution there! Victor
thought, and he garrotted the unruly mind of a man really feeling
devoutness in the presence of the shadow thrown by the dread Shade.

'Ten minutes,' Mr. Buttermore said low, after obligingly placing them on
the chairs.

He went. They were alone with Mrs. Burman.

No voice came. They were unsure of being seen by the floating grey of
eyes patient to gaze from their vast distance. Big drops fell from
Nataly's. Victor heard the French timepiece on the mantel-shelf, where a
familiar gilt Cupid swung for the seconds: his own purchase. The time of
day on the clock was wrong; the Cupid swung.

Nataly's mouth was taking breath of anguish at moments. More than a
minute of the terrible length of the period of torture must have gone:
two, if not three.

A quaver sounded. 'You have come.' The voice was articulate, thinner than
the telephonic, trans-Atlantic by deep-sea cable.

Victor answered: 'We have.'

Another minute must have gone in the silence. And when we get to five
minutes we are on the descent, rapidly counting our way out of the house,
into the fresh air, where we were half an hour back, among those happy
beasts in the pleasant Gardens!

Mrs. Burman's eyelids shut. 'I said you would come.'

Victor started to the fire-screen. 'Your sight requires protection.'

She dozed. 'And Natalia Dreighton!' she next said.

They were certainly now on the five minutes. Now for the slide downward
and outward! Nataly should never have been allowed to come.

'The white waistcoat!' struck his ears.

'Old customs with me, always!' he responded. 'The first of April, always.
White is a favourite. Pale blue, too. But I fear--I hope you have not
distressing nights? In my family we lay great stress on the nights we
pass. My cousins, the Miss Duvidneys, go so far as to judge of the
condition of health by the nightly record.'

'Your daughter was in their house.'

She knew everything!

'Very fond of my daughter--the ladies,' he remarked.

'I wish her well.'

'You are very kind.'

Mrs. Burman communed within or slept. 'Victor, Natalia, we will pray,'
she said.

Her trembling hands crossed their fingers. Nataly slipped to her knees.

The two women mutely praying, pulled Victor into the devotional hush. It
acted on him like the silent spell of service in a Church. He forgot his
estimate of the minutes, he formed a prayer, he refused to hear the Cupid
swinging, he droned a sound of sentences to deaden his ears. Ideas of
eternity rolled in semblance of enormous clouds. Death was a black bird
among them. The piano rang to Nataly's young voice and his. The gold and
white of the chairs welcomed a youth suddenly enrolled among the wealthy
by an enamoured old lady on his arm. Cupid tick-ticked.--Poor soul! poor
woman! How little we mean to do harm when we do an injury! An
incomprehensible world indeed at the bottom and at the top. We get on
fairly at the centre. Yet it is there that we do the mischief making such
a riddle of the bottom and the top. What is to be said! Prayer quiets
one. Victor peered at Nataly fervently on her knees and Mrs. Burman bowed
over her knotted fingers. The earnestness of both enforced an effort at a
phrased prayer in him. Plungeing through a wave of the scent of
Marechale, that was a tremendous memory to haul him backward and forward,
he beheld his prayer dancing across the furniture; a diminutive thin
black figure, elvish, irreverent, appallingly unlike his proper emotion;
and he brought his hands just to touch, and got to the edge of his chair,
with split knees. At once the figure vanished. By merely looking at
Nataly, he passed into her prayer. A look at Mrs. Burman made it
personal, his own. He heard the cluck of a horrible sob coming from him.
After a repetition of his short form of prayer deeply stressed, he
thanked himself with the word 'sincere,' and a queer side-thought on our
human susceptibility to the influence of posture. We are such creatures.

Nataly resumed her seat. Mrs. Burman had raised her head. She said: 'We
are at peace.' She presently said, with effort: 'It cannot last with me.
I die in nature's way. I would bear forgiveness with me, that I may have
it above. I give it here, to you, to all. My soul is cleansed, I trust.
Much was to say. My strength will not. Unto God, you both!'

The Rev. Groseman Buttermore was moving on slippered step to the back of
the sofa. Nataly dropped before the unseeing, scarce breathing, lady for
an instant. Victor murmured an adieu, grateful for being spared the
ceremonial shake of hands. He turned away, then turned back, praying for
power to speak, to say that he had found his heart, was grateful, would
hold her in memory. He fell on a knee before her, and forgot he had done
so when he had risen. They were conducted by the Rev. gentleman to the
hall-door: he was not speechless. Jarniman uttered something.

That black door closed behind them.




CHAPTER XLI

THE NIGHT OF THE GREAT UNDELIVERED SPEECH

To a man issuing from a mortuary where a skull had voice, London may be
restorative as air of Summer Alps. It is by contrast blooming life.
Observe the fellowship of the houses shoulder to shoulder; and that
straight ascending smoke of the preparation for dinner; and the good
policeman yonder, blessedly idle on an orderly Sabbath evening; and the
families of the minor people trotting homeward from the park to tea; here
and again an amiable carriage of the superimposed people driving to pay
visits; they are so social, friendly, inviting to him; they strip him of
the shroud, sing of the sweet old world. He cannot but be moved to the
extremity of the charitableness neighbouring on tears.

A stupefaction at the shock of the positive reminder, echo of the fact
still shouting in his breast, that he had seen Mrs. Burman, and that the
interview was over--the leaf turned and the book shut held Victor in a
silence until his gratefulness to London City was borne down by the more
human burst of gratitude to the dying woman, who had spared him, as much
as she could, a scene of the convulsive pathetic, and had not called on
him for any utterance of penitence. That worm-like thread of voice came
up to him still from sexton-depths: it sounded a larger forgiveness
without the word. He felt the sorrow of it all, as he told Nataly; at the
same time bidding her smell 'the marvellous oxygen of the park.' He
declared it to be quite equal to Lakelands.

She slightly pressed his arm for answer. Perhaps she did not feel so
deeply? She was free of the horrid associations with the scent of
Marechale. At any rate, she had comported herself admirably!

Victor fancied he must have shuddered when he passed by Jarniman at the
door, who was almost now seeing his mistress's ghost--would have the
privilege to-morrow. He called a cab and drove to Mrs. John Cormyn's, at
Nataly's request, for Nesta and mademoiselle: enjoying the Londonized
odour of the cab. Nataly did not respond to his warm and continued
eulogies of Mrs. Burman; she rather disappointed him. He talked of the
gold and white furniture, he just alluded to the Cupid: reserving his
mental comment, that the time-piece was all astray, the Cupid regular on
the swing:--strange, touching, terrible, if really the silly gilt figure
symbolized! . . . And we are a silly figure to be sitting in a cab
imagining such things!--When Nesta and mademoiselle were opposite, he had
the pleasure to see Nataly take Nesta's hand and hold it until they
reached home. Those two talking together in the brief words of their deep
feeling, had tones that were singularly alike: the mezzo-soprano filial
to the divine maternal contralto. Those two dear ones mounted to Nataly's
room.

The two dear ones showed themselves heart in heart together once more;
each looked the happier for it. Dartrey was among their dinner-guests,
and Nataly took him to her little blue-room before she went to bed. He
did not speak of their conversation to Victor, but counselled him to keep
her from excitement. 'My dear fellow, if you had seen her with Mrs.
Burman!' Victor said, and loudly praised her coolness. She was never
below a situation, he affirmed.

He followed his own counsel to humour his Nataly. She began panting at a
word about Mr. Barmby's ready services. When, however, she related the
state of affairs between Dartrey and Nesta, by the avowal of each of them
to her, he said, embracing her: 'Your wisdom shall guide us, my love,'
and almost extinguished a vexation by concealing it.

She sighed: 'If one could think, that a girl with Nesta's revolutionary
ideas of the duties of women, and their powers, would be safe--or at all
rightly guided by a man who is both one of the noblest and the wildest in
the ideas he entertains!'

Victor sighed too. He saw the earldom, which was to dazzle the gossips,
crack on the sky in a futile rocket-bouquet.

She was distressed; she moaned: 'My girl! my girl: I should wish to leave
her with one who is more fixed--the old-fashioned husband. New ideas must
come in politics, but in Society!--and for women! And the young having
heads, are the most endangered. Nesta vows her life to it! Dartrey
supports her!'

'See Colney,' said Victor. 'Odd, Colney does you good; some queer way he
has. Though you don't care for his RIVAL TONGUES,--and the last number
was funny, with Semhians on the Pacific, impressively addressing a
farewell to his cricket-bat, before he whirls it away to Neptune--and the
blue hand of his nation's protecting God observed to seize it!--Dead
failure with the public, of course! However, he seems to seem wise with
you. The poor old fellow gets his trouncing from the critics monthly. See
Colney to-morrow, my love. Now go to sleep. We have got over the worst. I
speak at my Meeting to-morrow and am a champagne-bottle of notes and
points for them.'

His lost Idea drew close to him in sleep: or he thought so, when awaking
to the conception of a people solidified, rich and poor, by the common
pride of simple manhood. But it was not coloured, not a luminous globe:
and the people were in drab, not a shining army on the march to meet the
Future. It looked like a paragraph in a newspaper, upon which a Leading
Article sits, dutifully arousing the fat worm of sarcastic humour under
the ribs of cradled citizens, with an exposure of its excellent folly. He
would not have it laughed at; still he could not admit it as more than a
skirt of the robe of his Idea. For let none think him a mere City
merchant, millionnaire, boon-fellow, or music-loving man of the world. He
had ideas to shoot across future Ages;--provide against the shrinkage of
our Coal-beds; against, and for, if you like, the thickening, jumbling,
threatening excess of population in these Islands, in Europe, America,
all over our habitable sphere. Now that Mrs. Burman, on her way to bliss,
was no longer the dungeon-cell for the man he would show himself to be,
this name for successes, corporate nucleus of the enjoyments, this Victor
Montgomery Radnor, intended impressing himself upon the world as a
factory of ideas. Colney's insolent charge, that the English have no
imagination--a doomed race, if it be true!--would be confuted. For our
English require but the lighted leadership to come into cohesion, and
step ranked, and chant harmoniously the song of their benevolent aim. And
that astral head giving, as a commencement, example of the right use of
riches, the nation is one, part of the riddle of the future solved.

Surely he had here the Idea? He had it so warmly, that his bath-water
heated. Only the vision was wanted.

On London Bridge he had seen it--a great thing done to the flash of
brilliant results. That was after a fall.

There had been a fall also of the scheme of Lakelands.

Come to us with no superstitious whispers of indications and
significations in the fall!--But there had certainly been a moral fall,
fully to the level of the physical, in the maintaining of that scheme of
Lakelands, now ruined by his incomprehensible Nesta--who had saved him
from falling further. His bath-water chilled. He jumped out and rubbed
furiously with his towels and flesh-brushes, chasing the Idea for simple
warmth, to have Something inside him, to feel just that sustainment; with
the cry: But no one can say I do not love my Nataly! And he tested it to
prove it by his readiness to die for her: which is heroically easier than
the devotedly living, and has a weight of evidence in our internal Courts
for surpassing the latter tedious performance.

His Nesta had knocked Lakelands to pieces. Except for the making of
money, the whole year of an erected Lakelands, notwithstanding
uninterrupted successes, was a blank. Or rather we have to wish it were a
blank. The scheme departs: payment for the enlisted servants of it is in
prospect. A black agent, not willingly enlisted, yet pointing to proofs
of service, refuses payment in ordinary coin; and we tell him we owe him
nothing, that he is not a man of the world, has no understanding of
Nature: and still the fellow thumps and alarums at a midnight door we are
astonished to find we have in our daylight house. How is it? Would other
men be so sensitive to him? Victor was appeased by the assurance of his
possession of an exceptionally scrupulous conscience; and he settled the
debate by thinking: 'After all, for a man like me, battling incessantly,
a kind of Vesuvius, I must have--can't be starved, must be fed--though,
pah! But I'm not to be questioned like other men.--But how about an
aristocracy of the contempt of distinctions?--But there is no escaping
distinctions! my aristocracy despises indulgence.--And indulges?--Say, an
exceptional nature! Supposing a certain beloved woman to pronounce on the
case?--She cannot: no woman can be a just judge of it.'---He cried: My
love of her is testified by my having Barmby handy to right her to-day,
tomorrow, the very instant the clock strikes the hour of my release!

Mention of the clock swung that silly gilt figure. Victor entered into
it, condemned to swing, and be a thrall. His intensity of sensation
launched him on an eternity of the swinging in ridiculous nakedness to
the measure of time gone crazy. He had to correct a reproof of Mrs.
Burman, as the cause of the nonsense. He ran down to breakfast, hopeing
he might hear of that clock stopped, and that sickening motion with it.

Another letter from the Sanfredini in Milan, warmly inviting to her villa
over Como, acted on him at breakfast like the waving of a banner. 'We
go,' Victor said to Nataly, and flattered-up a smile about her lips--too
much a resurrection smile. There was talk of the Meeting at the theatre:
Simeon Fenellan had spoken there in the cause of the deceased Member, was
known, and was likely to have a good reception. Fun and enthusiasm might
be expected.

'And my darling will hear her husband speak to-night,' he whispered as he
was departing; and did a mischief, he had to fear, for a shadowy knot
crossed Nataly's forehead, she seemed paler. He sent back Nesta and
mademoiselle, in consequence, at the end of the Green Park.

Their dinner-hour was early; Simeon Fenellan, Colney Durance, and Mr.
Peridon--pleasing to Nataly for his faithful siege of the French
fortress--were the only guests. When they rose, Nataly drew Victor aside.
He came dismayed to Nesta. She ran to her mother. 'Not hear papa speak?
Oh, mother, mother! Then I stay with her. But can't she come? He is going
to unfold ideas to us. There!'

'My naughty girl is not to poke her fun at orators,' Nataly said. 'No,
dearest; it would agitate me to go. I'm better here. I shall be at peace
when the night is over.'

'But you will be all alone here, dear mother.'

Nataly's eyes wandered to fall on Colney. He proposed to give her his
company. She declined it. Nesta ventured another entreaty, either that
she might be allowed to stay or have her mother with her at the Meeting.

'My love,' Nataly said, 'the thought of the Meeting--' She clasped at her
breast; and she murmured: 'I shall be comforted by your being with him.
There is no danger there. But I shall be happy, I shall be at peace when
this night is over.'

Colney persuaded her to have him for companion. Mr. Peridon, who was to
have driven with Nesta and mademoiselle, won admiration by proposing to
stay for an hour and play some of Mrs. Radnor's favourite pieces. Nesta
and Victor overbore Nataly's objections to the lover's generosity. So Mr.
Peridon was left. Nesta came hurrying back from the step of the carriage
to kiss her mother again, saying: 'Just one last kiss, my own! And she's
not to look troubled. I shall remember everything to tell my own mother.
It will soon be over.'

Her mother nodded; but the embrace was passionate.

Nesta called her father into the passage, bidding him prohibit any
delivery to her mother of news at the door. 'She is easily startled now
by trifles--you have noticed?'

Victor summoned his recollections and assured her he had noticed, as he
believed he had 'The dear heart of her is fretting for the night to be
over! And think! seven days, and she is in Lakelands. A fortnight, and we
have our first Concert. Durandarte! Oh, the dear heart 'll be at peace
when I tell her of a triumphant Meeting. Not a doubt of that, even though
Colney turns the shadow of his back on us.'

'One critic the less for you!' said Nesta. Skepsey was to meet her
carriage at the theatre.

Ten minutes later, Victor and Simeon Fenellan were proceeding thitherward
on foot.

'I have my speech,' said Victor. 'You prepare the way for me, following
our influential friend Dubbleson; Colewort winds up; any one else they
shout for. We shall have a great evening. I suspect I shall find Themison
or Jarniman when I get home. You don't believe in intimations? I've had
crapy processions all day before my eyes. No wonder, after yesterday!'

'Dubbleson mustn't drawl it out too long,' said Fenellan.

'We 'll drop a hint. Where's Dartrey?'

'He'll come. He's in one of his black moods: not temper. He's got a
notion he killed his wife by dragging her to Africa with him. She was not
only ready to go, she was glad to go. She had a bit of the heroine in her
and a certainty of tripping to the deuce if she was left to herself.'

'Tell Nataly that,' said Victor. 'And tell her about Dartrey. Harp on it.
Once she was all for him and our girl. But it's a woman--though the
dearest! I defy any one to hit on the cause of their changes. We must
make the best of things, if we're for swimming. The task for me to-night
will be, to keep from rolling out all I've got in my head. And I'm not
revolutionary, I'm for stability. Only I do see, that the firm
stepping-place asks for a long stride to be taken. One can't get the
English to take a stride--unless it's for a foot behind them: bother old
Colney! Too timid, or too scrupulous, down we go into the mire.
There!--But I want to say it! I want to save the existing order. I want,
Christianity, instead of the Mammonism we 're threatened with. Great
fortunes now are becoming the giants of old to stalk the land: or
mediaeval Barons. Dispersion of wealth, is the secret. Nataly's of that
mind with me. A decent poverty! She's rather wearying, wants a change.
I've a steam-yacht in my eye, for next month on the Mediterranean. All
our set. She likes quiet. I believe in my political recipe for it.'

He thumped on a method he had for preserving aristocracy--true
aristocracy, amid a positively democratic flood of riches.

'It appears to me, you're on the road of Priscilla Graves and Pempton,'
observed Simeon. 'Strike off Priscilla's viands and friend Pempton's
couple of glasses, and there's your aristocracy established; but with
rather a dispersed recognition of itself.'

'Upon my word, you talk like old Colney, except for a twang of your own,'
said Victor. 'Colney sours at every fresh number of that Serial. The
last, with Delphica detecting the plot of Falarique, is really not so
bad. The four disguised members of the Comedie Francaise on board the
vessel from San Francisco, to declaim and prove the superior merits of
the Gallic tongue, jumped me to bravo the cleverness. And Bobinikine
turning to the complexion of the remainder of cupboard dumplings
discovered in an emigrant's house-to-let! And Semhians--I forget what and
Mytharete's forefinger over the bridge of his nose, like a pensive
vulture on the skull of a desert camel! But, I complain, there's nothing
to make the English love the author; and it's wasted, he's basted, and
the book 'll have no sale. I hate satire.'

'Rough soap for a thin skin, Victor. Does it hurt our people much?'

'Not a bit; doesn't touch them. But I want my friends to succeed!'

Their coming upon Westminster Bridge changed the theme. Victor wished the
Houses of Parliament to catch the beams of sunset. He deferred to the
suggestion, that the Hospital's doing so seemed appropriate.

'I'm always pleased to find a decent reason for what is,' he said. Then
he queried: 'But what is, if we look at it, and while we look, Simeon?
She may be going--or she's gone already, poor woman! I shall have that
scene of yesterday everlastingly before my eyes, like a drop-curtain.
Only, you know, Simeon, they don't feel the end, as we in health imagine.
Colney would say, we have the spasms and they the peace. I 've a mind to
send up to Regent's Park with inquiries. It would look respectful. God
forgive me!--the poor woman perverts me at every turn. Though I will say,
a certain horror of death I had--she whisked me out of it yesterday. I
don't feel it any longer. What are you jerking at?'

'Only to remark, that if the thing's done for us, we haven't it so much
on our sensations.'

'More, if we're sympathetic. But that compels us to be philosophic--or
who could live! Poor woman!'

'Waft her gently, Victor!'

'Tush! Now for the South side of the Bridges; and I tell you, Simeon,
what I can't mention to-night: I mean to enliven these poor dear people
on their forsaken South of the City. I 've my scheme. Elected or not, I
shall hardly be accused of bribery when I put down my first instalment.'

Fenellan went to work with that remark in his brain for the speech he was
to deliver. He could not but reflect on the genial man's willingness and
capacity to do deeds of benevolence, constantly thwarted by the position
into which he had plunged himself.

They were received at the verge of the crowd outside the theatre-doors by
Skepsey, who wriggled, tore and clove a way for them, where all were
obedient, but the numbers lumped and clogged. When finally they reached
the stage, they spied at Nesta's box, during the thunder of the rounds of
applause, after shaking hands with Mr. Dubbleson, Sir Abraham Quatley,
Dudley Sowerby, and others; and with Beaves Urmsing--a politician 'never
of the opposite party to a deuce of a funny fellow!--go anywhere to hear
him,' he vowed.

'Miss Radnor and Mademoiselle de Seilles arrived quite safely,' said
Dudley, feasting on the box which contained them and no Dartrey Fenellan
in it.

Nesta was wondering at Dartrey's absence. Not before Mr. Dubbleson, the
chairman, the 'gentleman of local influence,' had animated the drowsed
wits and respiratory organs of a packed audience by yielding place to
Simeon, did Dartrey appear. Simeon's name was shouted, in proof of the
happy explosion of his first anecdote, as Dartrey took seat behind Nesta.
'Half an hour with the dear mother,' he said.

Nesta's eyes thanked him. She pressed the hand of a demure young woman
sitting close behind. Louise de Seilles. 'You know Matilda Pridden.'

Dartrey held his hand out. 'Has she forgiven me?'

Matilda bowed gravely, enfolding her affirmative in an outline of the no
need for it, with perfect good breeding. Dartrey was moved to think
Skepsey's choice of a woman to worship did him honour. He glanced at
Louise. Her manner toward Matilda Pridden showed her sisterly with Nesta.
He said: 'I left Mr. Peridon playing.--A little anxiety to hear that the
great speech of the evening is done; it's nothing else. I'll run to her
as soon as it's over.'

'Oh, good of you! And kind of Mr. Peridon!' She turned to Louise, who
smiled at the simple art of the exclamation, assenting.

Victor below, on the stage platform, indicated the waving of a hand to
them, and his delight at Simeon's ringing points: which were, to
Dartrey's mind, vacuously clever and crafty. Dartrey despised effects of
oratory, save when soldiers had to be hurled on a mark--or citizens
nerved to stand for their country.

Nesta dived into her father's brilliancy of appreciation, a trifle pained
by Dartrey's aristocratic air when he surveyed the herd of heads agape
and another cheer rang round. He smiled with her, to be with her, at a
hit here and there; he would not pretend an approval of this manner of
winning electors to consider the country's interests and their own. One
fellow in the crowded pit, affecting a familiarity with Simeon, that
permitted the taking of liberties with the orator's Christian name,
mildly amused him. He had no objection to hear 'Simmy' shouted, as Louise
de Seilles observed. She was of his mind, in regard to the rough
machinery of Freedom.