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Mrs W.B. Meloney - "Better Homes in America"

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One of Our Conquerors, Complete

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




He consulted his watch. The maid had come in for the robeing of her
mistress. Nataly's mind had turned to the little country cottage which
would have given her such great happiness. She raised her eyes to him;
she could not check their filling; they were like a river carrying
moonlight on the smooth roll of a fall.

He loved the eyes, disliked the water in them. With an impatient, 'There,
there!' and a smart affectionate look, he retired, thinking in our old
satirical vein of the hopeless endeavour to satisfy a woman's mind
without the intrusion of hard material statements, facts. Even the best
of women, even the most beautiful, and in their moments of supremest
beauty, have this gross ravenousness for facts. You must not expect to
appease them unless you administer solids. It would almost appear that
man is exclusively imaginative and poetical; and that his mate, the fair,
the graceful, the bewitching, with the sweetest and purest of natures,
cannot help being something of a groveller.

Nataly had likewise her thoughts.




CHAPTER VII

BETWEEN A GENERAL MAN OF THIN WORLD AND A PROFESSIONAL

Rather earlier in the afternoon of that day, Simeon Fenellan, thinking of
the many things which are nothing, and so melancholy for lack of
amusements properly to follow Old Veuve, that he could ask himself
whether he had not done a deed of night, to be blinking at his fellow-men
like an owl all mad for the reveller's hoots and flights and mice and
moony roundels behind his hypocritical judex air of moping composure,
chanced on Mr. Carling, the solicitor, where Lincoln's Inn pumps lawyers
into Fleet Street through the drain-pipe of Chancery Lane. He was in the
state of the wine when a shake will rouse the sluggish sparkles to foam.
Sight of Mrs. Burman's legal adviser had instantly this effect upon him:
his bubbling friendliness for Victor Radnor, and the desire of the voice
in his bosom for ears to hear, combined like the rush of two waves
together, upon which he may be figured as the boat: he caught at Mr.
Carling's hand more heartily than their acquaintanceship quite
sanctioned; but his grasp and his look of overflowing were immediately
privileged; Mr. Carling, enjoying this anecdotal gentleman's conversation
as he did, liked the warmth, and was flattered during the squeeze with a
prospect of his wife and friends partaking of the fun from time to time.

'I was telling my wife yesterday your story of the lady contrabandist: I
don't think she has done laughing since,' Mr. Calling said.

Fenellan fluted: 'Ah?' He had scent, in the eulogy of a story grown flat
as Election hats, of a good sort of man in the way of men, a step or two
behind the man of the world. He expressed profound regret at not having
heard the silvery ring of the lady's laughter.

Carling genially conceived a real gratification to be conferred on his
wife. 'Perhaps you will some day honour us?'

'You spread gold-leaf over the days to come, sir.'

'Now, if I might name the day?'

'You lump the gold and make it current coin;--says the blushing bride,
who ought not to have delivered herself so boldly, but she had forgotten
her bashful part and spoilt the scene, though, luckily for the damsel,
her swain was a lover of nature, and finding her at full charge, named
the very next day of the year, and held her to it, like the complimentary
tyrant he was.'

'To-morrow, then!' said Carling intrepidly, on a dash of enthusiasm,
through a haggard thought of his wife and the cook and the netting of
friends at short notice. He urged his eagerness to ask whether he might
indeed have the satisfaction of naming to-morrow.

'With happiness,' Fenellan responded.

Mrs. Carling was therefore in for it.

'To-morrow, half-past seven: as for company to meet you, we will do what
we can. You go Westward?'

'To bed with the sun,' said the reveller.

'Perhaps by Covent Garden? I must give orders there.'

'Orders given in Covent Garden, paint a picture for bachelors of the
domestic Paradise an angel must help them to enter! Ah, dear me! Is there
anything on earth to compare with the pride of a virtuous life?'

'I was married at four and twenty,' said Carling, as one taking up the
expository second verse of a poem; plain facts, but weighty and
necessary: 'my wife was in her twentieth year: we have five children; two
sons, three daughters, one married, with a baby. So we are grandfather
and mother, and have never regretted the first step, I may say for both
of us.'

'Think of it! Good luck and sagacity joined hands overhead on the day you
proposed to the lady: and I'd say, that all the credit is with her, but
that it would seem to be at the expense of her sex.'

'She would be the last to wish it, I assure you.'

'True of all good women! You encourage me, touching a matter of deep
interest, not unknown to you. The lady's warm heart will be with us.
Probably she sees Mrs. Burman?'

'Mrs. Burman Radnor receives no one.'

A comic severity in the tone of the correction was deferentially accepted
by Fenellan.

'Pardon. She flies her flag, with her captain wanting; and she has,
queerly, the right. So, then, the worthy dame who receives no one, might
be treated, it struck us, conversationally, as a respectable
harbour-hulk, with more history than top-honours. But she has the
indubitable legal right to fly them--to proclaim it; for it means little
else.'

'You would have her, if I follow you, divest herself of the name?'

'Pin me to no significations, if you please, O shrewdest of the legal
sort! I have wit enough to escape you there. She is no doubt an estimable
person.'

'Well, she is; she is in her way a very good woman.'

'Ah. You see, Mr. Carling, I cannot bring myself to rank her beside
another lady, who has already claimed the title of me; and you will
forgive me if I say, that your word "good" has a look of being stuck upon
the features we know of her, like a coquette's naughty patch; or it's a
jewel of an eye in an ebony idol: though I've heard tell she performs her
charities.'

'I believe she gives away three parts of her income and that is large.'

'Leaving the good lady a fine fat fourth.'

'Compare her with other wealthy people.'

'And does she outshine the majority still with her personal attractions.

Carling was instigated by the praise he had bestowed on his wife to
separate himself from a female pretender so ludicrous; he sought
Fenellan's nearest ear, emitting the sound of 'hum.'

'In other respects, unimpeachable!'

'Oh! quite!'

'There was a fishfag of classic Billingsgate, who had broken her
husband's nose with a sledgehammer fist, and swore before the magistrate,
that the man hadn't a crease to complain of in her character. We are
condemned, Mr. Carling, sometimes to suffer in the flesh for the
assurance we receive of the inviolability of those moral fortifications.'

'Character, yes, valuable--I do wish you had named to-night for doing me
the honour of dining with me!' said the lawyer impulsively, in a rapture
of the appetite for anecdotes. 'I have a ripe Pichon Longueville, '65.'

'A fine wine. Seductive to hear of. I dine with my friend Victor Radnor.
And he knows wine.--There are good women in the world, Mr. Carling, whose
characters . . .'

'Of course, of course there are; and I could name you some.
We lawyers . . . !'

'You encounter all sorts.'

'Between ourselves,' Carling sank his tones to the indiscriminate, where
it mingled with the roar of London.

'You do?' Fenellan hazarded a guess at having heard enlightened liberal
opinions regarding the sex. 'Right!'

'Many!'

'I back you, Mr. Carling.'

The lawyer pushed to yet more confidential communication, up to the verge
of the clearly audible: he spoke of examples, experiences. Fenellan
backed him further.

'Acting on behalf of clients, you understand, Mr. Fenellan.'

'Professional, but charitable; I am with you.'

'Poor things! we--if we have to condemn--we owe them something.'

'A kind word for poor Polly Venus, with all the world against her! She
doesn't hear it often.'

'A real service,' Carling's voice deepened to the legal 'without
prejudice,'--'I am bound to say it--a service to Society.'

'Ah, poor wench! And the kind of reward she gets?'

'We can hardly examine . . . mysterious dispensations . . . here we are
to make the best we can of it.'

'For the creature Society's indebted to? True. And am I to think there's
a body of legal gentlemen to join with you, my friend, in founding an
Institution to distribute funds to preach charity over the country, and
win compassion for her, as one of the principal persons of her time, that
Society's indebted to for whatever it's indebted for?'

'Scarcely that,' said Carling, contracting.

'But you 're for great Reforms?'

'Gradual.'

'Then it's for Reformatories, mayhap.'

'They would hardly be a cure.'

'You 're in search of a cure?'

'It would be a blessed discovery.'

'But what's to become of Society?'

'It's a puzzle to the cleverest.'

'All through History, my dear Mr. Carling, we see that.

'Establishments must have their sacrifices. Beware of interfering: eh?'

'By degrees, we may hope . . . .'

'Society prudently shuns the topic; and so 'll we. For we might tell of
one another, in a fit of distraction, that t' other one talked of it, and
we should be banished for an offence against propriety. You should read
my friend Durance's Essay on Society. Lawyers are a buttress of Society.
But, come: I wager they don't know what they support until they read that
Essay.'

Carling had a pleasant sense of escape, in not being personally asked to
read the Essay, and not hearing that a copy of it should be forwarded to
him.

He said: 'Mr. Radnor is a very old friend?'

'Our fathers were friends; they served in the same regiment for years. I
was in India when Victor Radnor took the fatal!'

'Followed by a second, not less . . . ?'

'In the interpretation of a rigid morality arming you legal gentlemen to
make it so!'

'The Law must be vindicated.'

'The law is a clumsy bludgeon.'

'We think it the highest effort of human reason--the practical
instrument.'

'You may compare it to a rustic's finger on a fiddlestring, for the
murdered notes you get out of the practical instrument.

'I am bound to defend it, clumsy bludgeon or not.'

'You are one of the giants to wield it, and feel humanly, when, by
chance, down it comes on the foot an inch off the line.--Here's a peep of
Old London; if the habit of old was not to wash windows. I like these old
streets!'

'Hum,' Carling hesitated. 'I can remember when the dirt at the windows
was appalling.'

'Appealing to the same kind of stuff in the passing youngster's
green-scum eye: it was. And there your Law did good work.--You're for
Bordeaux. What is your word on Burgundy?'

'Our Falernian!'

'Victor Radnor has the oldest in the kingdom. But he will have the best
of everything. A Romanee! A Musigny! Sip, my friend, you embrace the
Goddess of your choice above. You are up beside her at a sniff of that
wine.--And lo, venerable Drury! we duck through the court, reminded a bit
by our feelings of our first love, who hadn't the cleanest of faces or
nicest of manners, but she takes her station in memory because we were
boys then, and the golden halo of youth is upon her.'

Carling, as a man of the world, acquiesced in souvenirs he did not share.
He said urgently: 'Understand me; you speak of Mr. Radnor; pray, believe
I have the greatest respect for Mr. Radnor's abilities. He is one of our
foremost men . . . proud of him. Mr. Radnor has genius; I have watched
him; it is genius; he shows it in all he does; one of the memorable men
of our times. I can admire him, independent of--well, misfortune of that
kind . . . a mistaken early step. Misfortune, it is to be named. Between
ourselves--we are men of the world--if one could see the way! She
occasionally . . . as I have told you. I have ventured suggestions. As I
have mentioned, I have received an impression . . .'

'But still, Mr. Carling, if the lady doesn't release him and will keep
his name, she might stop her cowardly persecutions.'

'Can you trace them?'

'Undisguised!'

'Mrs. Burman Radnor is devout. I should not exactly say revengeful. We
have to discriminate. I gather, that her animus is, in all honesty,
directed at the--I quote--state of sin. We are mixed, you know.'

The Winegod in the blood of Fenellan gave a leap. 'But, fifty thousand
times more mixed, she might any moment stop the state of sin, as she
calls it, if it pleased her.'

'She might try. Our Judges look suspiciously on long delayed actions. And
there are, too, women who regard the marriage-tie as indissoluble. She
has had to combat that scruple.'

'Believer in the renewing of the engagement overhead!--well. But put a
by-word to Mother Nature about the state of sin. Where, do you imagine,
she would lay it? You'll say, that Nature and Law never agreed. They
ought.'

'The latter deferring to the former?'

'Moulding itself on her swelling proportions. My dear dear sir, the state
of sin was the continuing to live in defiance of, in contempt of, in
violation of, in the total degradation of, Nature.'

'He was under no enforcement to take the oath at the altar.'

'He was a small boy tempted by a varnished widow, with pounds of barley
sugar in her pockets;--and she already serving as a test-vessel or mortar
for awful combinations in druggery! Gilt widows are equal to decrees of
Fate to us young ones. Upon my word, the cleric who unites, and the Law
that sanctions, they're the criminals. Victor Radnor is the noblest of
fellows, the very best friend a man can have. I will tell you: he saved
me, after I left the army, from living on the produce of my pen--which
means, if there is to be any produce, the prostrating of yourself to the
level of the round middle of the public: saved me from that! Yes, Mr.
Carling, I have trotted our thoroughfares a poor Polly of the pen; and it
is owing to Victor Radnor that I can order my thoughts as an individual
man again before I blacken paper. Owing to him, I have a tenderness for
mercenaries; having been one of them and knowing how little we can help
it. He is an Olympian--who thinks of them below. The lady also is an
admirable woman at all points. The pair are a mated couple, such as you
won't find in ten households over Christendom. Are you aware of the
story?'

Carling replied: 'A story under shadow of the Law, has generally two very
distinct versions.'

'Hear mine.--And, by Jove! a runaway cab. No, all right. But a crazy cab
it is, and fit to do mischief in narrow Drury. Except that it's sheer
riff-raff here to knock over.'

'Hulloa?--come!' quoth the wary lawyer.

'There's the heart I wanted to rouse to hear me! One may be sure that the
man for old Burgundy has it big and sound, in spite of his legal
practices; a dear good spherical fellow! Some day, we'll hope, you will
be sitting with us over a magnum of Victor Radnor's Romance Conti aged
thirty-one: a wine, you'll say at the second glass, High Priest for the
celebration of the uncommon nuptials between the body and the soul of
man.'

'You hit me rightly,'said Carting, tickled and touched; sensually excited
by the bouquet of Victor Radnor's hospitality and companionship, which
added flavour to Fenellan's compliments. These came home to him through
his desire to be the 'good spherical fellow'; for he, like modern
diplomatists in the track of their eminent Berlinese New Type of the
time, put on frankness as an armour over wariness, holding craft in
reserve: his aim was at the refreshment of honest fellowship: by no means
to discover that the coupling of his native bias with his professional
duty was unprofitable nowadays. Wariness, however, was not somnolent,
even when he said: 'You know, I am never the lawyer out of my office. Man
of the world to men of the world; and I have not lost by it. I am Mrs.
Barman Radnor's legal adviser: you are Mr. Victor Radnor's friend. They
are, as we see them, not on the best of terms. I would rather--at its
lowest, as a matter of business--be known for having helped them to some
kind of footing than send in a round bill to my client--or another. I
gain more in the end. Frankly, I mean to prove, that it's a lawyer's
interest to be human.'

'Because, now, see!' said Fenellan, 'here's the case. Miss Natalia
Dreighton, of a good Yorkshire family--a large one, reads an
advertisement for the post of companion to a lady, and answers it, and
engages herself, previous to the appearance of the young husband. Miss
Dreighton is one of the finest young women alive. She has a glorious
contralto voice. Victor and she are encouraged by Mrs. Barman to sing
duets together. Well?

Why, Euclid would have theorem'd it out for you at a glance at the trio.
You have only to look on them, you chatter out your three Acts of a Drama
without a stop. If Mrs. Barman cares to practise charity, she has only to
hold in her Fury-forked tongue, or her Jarniman I think 's the name.'

Carting shrugged.

'Let her keep from striking, if she's Christian,' pursued Fenetlan, 'and
if kind let her resume the name of her first lord, who did a better thing
for himself than for her, when he shook off his bars of bullion, to rise
the lighter, and left a wretched female soul below, with the devil's own
testimony to her attractions--thousands in the Funds, houses in the City.
She threw the young couple together. And my friend Victor Radnor is of a
particularly inflammable nature. Imagine one of us in such a situation,
Mr. Carting!'

'Trying!' said the lawyer.

'The dear fellow was as nigh death as a man can be and know the sweetness
of a woman's call to him to live. And here's London's garden of pines,
bananas, oranges; all the droppings of the Hesperides here! We don't
reflect on it, Mr. Carling.'

'Not enough, not enough.'

'I feel such a spout of platitudes that I could out With a Leading
Article on a sheet of paper on your back while you're bending over the
baskets. I seem to have got circularly round again to Eden when I enter a
garden. Only, here we have to pay for the fruits we pluck. Well, and just
the same there; and no end to the payment either. We're always paying! By
the way, Mrs. Victor Radnor's dinner-table's a spectacle. Her taste in
flowers equals her lord's in wine. But age improves the wine and spoils
the flowers, you'll say. Maybe you're for arguing that lovely women show
us more of the flower than the grape, in relation to the course of time.
I pray you not to forget the terrible intoxicant she is. We reconcile it,
Mr. Carling, with the notion that the grape's her spirit, the flower her
body. Or is it the reverse? Perhaps an intertwining. But look upon
bouquets and clusters, and the idea of woman springs up at once, proving
she's composed of them. I was about to remark, that with deference to the
influence of Mrs. Burman's legal adviser, an impenitent or penitent
sinner's pastor, the Reverend gentleman ministering to her spiritual
needs, would presumptively exercise it, in this instance, in a superior
degree.'

Carling murmured: 'The Rev. Groseman Buttermore'; and did so for
something of a cover, to continue a run of internal reflections: as, that
he was assuredly listening to vinous talk in the streets by day; which
impression placed him on a decorous platform above the amusing gentleman;
to whom, however, he grew cordial, in recognizing consequently, that his
exuberant flow could hardly be a mask; and that an indication here and
there of a trap in his talk, must have been due rather to excess of
wariness, habitual in the mind of a long-headed man, whose incorrigibly
impulsive fits had necessarily to be rectified by a vigilant dexterity.

'Buttermore!' ejaculated Fenellan: 'Groseman Buttermore! Mrs.
Victor's Father Confessor is the Rev. Septimus Barmby. Groseman
Buttermore--Septimus Barmby. Is there anything in names? Truly, unless
these clerical gentlemen take them up at the crossing of the roads long
after birth, the names would appear the active parts of them, and
themselves mere marching supports, like the bearers of street
placard-advertisements. Now, I know a Septimus Barmby, and you a Groseman
Buttermore, and beyond the fact that Reverend starts up before their
names without mention, I wager it's about all we do know of them. They're
Society's trusty rock-limpets, no doubt.'

'My respect for the cloth is extreme.' Carling's short cough prepared the
way for deductions. 'Between ourselves, they are men of the world.'

Fenellan eyed benevolently the worthy attorney, whose innermost imp burst
out periodically, like a Dutch clocksentry, to trot on his own small
grounds for thinking himself of the community of the man of the world.
'You lawyers dress in another closet,' he said. 'The Rev. Groseman has
the ear of the lady?'

'He has:--one ear.'

'Ah? She has the other open for a man of the world, perhaps.'

'Listens to him, listens to me, listens to Jarniman; and we neither of us
guide her. She's very curious--a study. You think you know her--next day
she has eluded you. She's emotional, she's hard; she's a woman, she's a
stone. Anything you like; but don't count on her. And another thing--I'm
bound to say it of myself,' Carling claimed close hearing of Fenellan
over a shelf of saladstuff, 'no one who comes near her has any real
weight with her in this matter.'

'Probably you mix cream in your salad of the vinegar and oil,' said
Fenellan. 'Try jelly of mutton.'--'You give me a new idea. Latterly, fond
as I am of salads, I've had rueful qualms. We'll try it.'

'You should dine with Victor Radnor.'

'French cook, of course!'

'Cordon bleu.'

'I like to be sure of my cutlet.'

'I like to be sure of a tastiness in my vegetables.'

'And good sauces!'

'And pretty pastry. I said, Cordon bleu. The miracle is, it 's a woman
that Victor Radnor has trained: French, but a woman; devoted to him, as
all who serve him are. Do I say "but" a woman? There's not a Frenchman
alive to match her. Vatel awaits her in Paradise with his arms extended;
and may he wait long!'

Carling indulged his passion for the genuine by letting a flutter of real
envy be seen. 'My wife would like to meet such a Frenchwoman. It must be
a privilege to dine with him--to know him. I know what he has done for
English Commerce, and to build a colossal fortune: genius, as I said: and
his donations to Institutions. Odd, to read his name and Mrs. Burman
Radnor's at separate places in the lists! Well, we'll hope. It's a case
for a compromise of sentiments and claims.'

'A friend of mine, spiced with cynic, declares that there's always an
amicable way out of a dissension, if we get rid of Lupus and Vulpus.'

Carling spied for a trap in the citation of Lupus and Vulpus; he saw
none, and named the square of his residence on the great Russell
property, and the number of the house, the hour of dinner next day. He
then hung silent, breaking the pause with his hand out and a sharp
'Well?' that rattled a whirligig sound in his head upward. His leave of
people was taken in this laughing falsetto, as of one affected by the
curious end things come to.

Fenellan thought of him for a moment or two, that he was a better than
the common kind of lawyer; who doubtless knew as much of the wrong side
of the world as lawyers do, and held his knowledge for the being a man of
the world:--as all do, that have not Alpine heights in the mind to mount
for a look out over their own and the world's pedestrian tracks. I could
spot the lawyer in your composition, my friend, to the exclusion of the
man he mused. But you're right in what you mean to say of yourself:
you're a good fellow, for a lawyer, and together we may manage somehow to
score a point of service to Victor Radnor.




CHAPTER VIII

SOME FAMILIAR GUESTS

Nesta read her mother's face when Mrs. Victor entered the drawing-room to
receive the guests. She saw a smooth fair surface, of the kind as much
required by her father's eyes as innocuous air by his nostrils: and it
was honest skin, not the deceptive feminine veiling, to make a dear man
happy over his volcano. Mrs. Victor was to meet the friends with whom her
feelings were at home, among whom her musical gifts gave her station:
they liked her for herself; they helped her to feel at home with herself
and be herself: a rarer condition with us all than is generally supposed.
So she could determine to be cheerful in the anticipation of an evening
that would at least be restful to the outworn sentinel nerve of her
heart, which was perpetually alert and signalling to the great organ;
often colouring the shows and seems of adverse things for an apeing of
reality with too cruel a resemblance. One of the scraps of practical
wisdom gained by hardened sufferers is, to keep from spying at horizons
when they drop into a pleasant dingle. Such is the comfort of it, that we
can dream, and lull our fears, and half think what we wish: and it is a
heavenly truce with the fretful mind divided from our wishes.

Nesta wondered at her mother's complacent questions concerning this
Lakelands: the house, the county, the kind of people about, the features
of the country. Physically unable herself to be regretful under a burden
three parts enrapturing her, the girl expected her mother to display a
shadowy vexation, with a proud word or two, that would summon her
thrilling sympathy in regard to the fourth part: namely, the aristocratic
iciness of country magnates, who took them up and cast them off; as they
had done, she thought, at Craye Farm and at Creckholt: she remembered it,
of the latter place, wincingly, insurgently, having loved the dear home
she had been expelled from by her pride of the frosty surrounding
people--or no, not all, but some of them. And what had roused their
pride?