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William Morris - "The Story of the Glittering Plain"

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One of Our Conquerors, Complete

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




Striking for a reason, her inexperience of our modern England,
supplemented by readings in the England of a preceding generation, had
hit on her father's profession of merchant. It accounted to her for the
behaviour of the haughty territorial and titled families. But certain of
the minor titles headed City Firms, she had heard; certain of the
families were avowedly commercial. 'They follow suit,' her father said at
Creckholt, after he had found her mother weeping, and decided instantly
to quit and fly once more. But if they followed suit in such a way, then
Mr. Durance must be right when he called the social English the most
sheepy of sheep:--and Nesta could not consent to the cruel verdict, she
adored her compatriots. Incongruities were pacified for her by the
suggestion of her quick wits, that her father, besides being a merchant,
was a successful speculator; and perhaps the speculator is not liked by
merchants; or they were jealous of him; or they did not like his being
both.

She pardoned them with some tenderness, on a suspicion that a quaint old
high-frilled bleached and puckered Puritanical rectitude (her thoughts
rose in pictures) possibly condemned the speculator as a description of
gambler. An erratic severity in ethics is easily overlooked by the
enthusiast for things old English. She was consciously ahead of them in
the knowledge that her father had been, without the taint of gambling, a
beneficent speculator. The Montgomery colony in South Africa, and his
dealings with the natives in India, and his Railways in South America,
his establishment of Insurance Offices, which were Savings Banks, and the
Stores for the dispensing of sound goods to the poor, attested it. O and
he was hospitable, the kindest, helpfullest of friends, the dearest, the
very brightest of parents: he was his girl's playmate. She could be
critic of him, for an induction to the loving of him more justly: yet if
he had an excessive desire to win the esteem of people, as these keen
young optics perceived in him, he strove to deserve it; and no one could
accuse him of laying stress on the benefits he conferred. Designedly,
frigidly to wound a man so benevolent, appeared to her as an
incomprehensible baseness. The dropping of acquaintanceship with him,
after the taste of its privileges, she ascribed, in the void of any
better elucidation, to a mania of aristocratic conceit. It drove her,
despite her youthful contempt of politics, into a Radicalism that could
find food in the epigrams of Mr. Colney Durance, even when they passed
her understanding; or when he was not too distinctly seen by her to be
shooting at all the parties of her beloved England, beneath the wicked
semblance of shielding each by turns.

The young gentleman introduced to the Radnor Concert-parties by Lady
Grace Halley as the Hon. Dudley Sowerby, had to bear the sins of his
class. Though he was tall, straight-featured, correct in costume,
appearance, deportment, second son of a religious earl and no scandal to
the parentage, he was less noticed by Nesta than the elderly and the
commoners. Her father accused her of snubbing him. She reproduced her
famous copy of the sugared acid of Mr. Dudley Sowerby's closed mouth: a
sort of sneer in meekness, as of humility under legitimate compulsion;
deploring Christianly a pride of race that stamped it for this cowled
exhibition: the wonderful mimicry was a flash thrown out by a born
mistress of the art, and her mother was constrained to laugh, and so was
her father; but he wilfully denied the likeness. He charged her with
encouraging Colney Durance to drag forth the sprig of nobility, in the
nakedness of evicted shell-fish, on themes of the peril to England,
possibly ruin, through the loss of that ruling initiative formerly
possessed, in the days of our glory, by the titular nobles of the land.
Colney spoke it effectively, and the Hon. Dudley's expressive lineaments
showed print of the heaving word Alas, as when a target is penetrated,
centrally. And he was not a particularly dull fellow 'for his class and
country,' Colney admitted; adding: 'I hit his thought and out he came.'
One has, reluctantly with Victor Radnor, to grant, that when a man's
topmost unspoken thought is hit, he must be sharp on his guard to keep
from coming out:--we have won a right to him.

'Only, it's too bad; it 's a breach of hospitality,' Victor said, both to
Nesta and to Nataly, alluding to several instances of Colney's ironic
handling of their guests, especially of this one, whom Nesta would
attack, and Nataly would not defend.

They were alive at a signal to protect the others. Miss Priscilla Graves,
an eater of meat, was ridiculous in her ant'alcoholic exclusiveness and
scorn: Mr. Pempton, a drinker of wine, would laud extravagantly the more
transparent purity of vegetarianism. Dr. Peter Yatt jeered at globules:
Dr. John Cormyn mourned over human creatures treated as cattle by big
doses. The Rev. Septimus Barmby satisfactorily smoked: Mr. Peridon traced
mortal evil to that act. Dr. Schlesien had his German views, Colney
Durance his ironic, Fenellan his fanciful and free-lance. And here was an
optimist, there a pessimist; and the rank Radical, the rigid
Conservative, were not wanting. All of them were pointedly opposed,
extraordinarily for so small an assembly: absurdly, it might be thought:
but these provoked a kind warm smile, with the exclamation: 'They are
dears!' They were the dearer for their fads and foibles.

Music harmonized them. Music, strangely, put the spell on Colney Durance,
the sayer of bitter things, manufacturer of prickly balls, in the form of
Discord's apples of whom Fenellan remarked, that he took to his music
like an angry little boy to his barley-sugar, with a growl and a grunt.
All these diverse friends could meet and mix in Victor's Concert-room
with an easy homely recognition of one another's musical qualities, at
times enthusiastic; and their natural divergencies and occasional clashes
added a salient tastiness to the group of whom Nesta could say: 'Mama,
was there ever such a collection of dear good souls with such contrary
minds?' Her mother had the deepest of reasons for loving them, so as not
to wish to see the slightest change in their minds, that the accustomed
features making her nest of homeliness and real peace might be retained,
with the humour of their funny silly antagonisms and the subsequent march
in concord; excepting solely as regarded the perverseness of Priscilla
Graves in her open contempt of Mr. Pempton's innocent two or three
wine-glasses. The vegetarian gentleman's politeness forbore to direct
attention to the gobbets of meat Priscilla consumed, though he could
express disapproval in general terms; but he entertained sentiments as
warlike to the lady's habit of 'drinking the blood of animals.' The
mockery of it was, that Priscilla liked Mr. Pempton and admired his
violoncello-playing, and he was unreserved in eulogy of her person and
her pure soprano tones. Nataly was a poetic match-maker. Mr. Peridon was
intended for Mademoiselle de Seilles, Nesta's young French governess; a
lady of a courtly bearing, with placid speculation in the eyes she cast
on a foreign people, and a voluble muteness shadowing at intervals along
the line of her closed lips.

The one person among them a little out of tune with most, was Lady Grace
Halley. Nataly's provincial gentlewoman's traditions of the manners
indicating conduct, reproved unwonted licences assumed by Lady Grace;
who, in allusion to Hymen's weaving of a cousinship between the earldom
of Southweare and that of Cantor, of which Mr. Sowerby sprang, set her
mouth and fan at work to delineate total distinctions, as it were from
the egg to the empyrean. Her stature was rather short, all of it
conversational, at the eyebrows, the shoulders, the finger-tips, the
twisting shape; a ballerina's expressiveness; and her tongue dashed half
sentences through and among these hieroglyphs, loosely and funnily
candid. Anybody might hear that she had gone gambling into the City, and
that she had got herself into a mess, and that by great good luck she had
come across Victor Radnor, who, with two turns of the wrist, had plucked
her out of the mire, the miraculous man! And she had vowed to him, never
again to run doing the like without his approval.

The cause of her having done it, was related with the accompaniments;
brows twitching, flitting smiles, shrugs, pouts, shifts of posture: she
was married to a centaur; out of the saddle a man of wood, 'an excellent
man.' For the not colloquial do not commit themselves. But one wants a
little animation in a husband. She called on bell-motion of the head to
toll forth the utter nightcap negative. He had not any: out of the
saddle, he was asleep:--'next door to the Last Trump,' Colney Durance
assisted her to describe the soundest of sleep in a husband, after wooing
her to unbosom herself. She was awake to his guileful arts, and sailed
along with him, hailing his phrases, if he shot a good one; prankishly
exposing a flexible nature, that took its holiday thus in a grinding
world, among maskers, to the horrification of the prim. So to refresh
ourselves, by having publicly a hip-bath in the truth while we shock our
hearers enough to be discredited for what we reveal, was a dexterous
merry twist, amusing to her; but it was less a cynical malice than her
nature that she indulged, 'A woman must have some excitement.' The most
innocent appeared to her the Stock Exchange. The opinions of husbands who
are not summoned to pay are hardly important; they vary.

Colney helped her now and then to step the trifle beyond her stride, but
if he was humorous, she forgave; and if together they appalled the
decorous, it was great gain. Her supple person, pretty lips, the style
she had, gave a pass to the wondrous confidings, which were for masculine
ears, whatever the sex. Nataly might share in them, but women did not
lead her to expansiveness; or not the women of the contracted class: Miss
Graves, Mrs. Cormyn, and others at the Radnor Concerts. She had a special
consideration for Mademoiselle de Seilles, owing to her exquisite French,
as she said; and she may have liked it, but it was the young
Frenchwoman's air of high breeding that won her esteem. Girls were spring
frosts to her. Fronting Nesta, she put on her noted smile, or wood-cut of
a smile, with its label of indulgence; except when the girl sang. Music
she loved. She said it was the saving of poor Dudley. It distinguished
him in the group of the noble Evangelical Cantor Family; and it gave him
a subject of assured discourse in company; and oddly, it contributed to
his comelier air. Flute [This would be the German Blockeflute or our
Recorder. D.W.] in hand, his mouth at the blow-stop was relieved of its
pained updraw by the form for puffing; he preserved a gentlemanly high
figure in his exercises on the instrument, out of ken of all likeness to
the urgent insistency of Victor Radnor's punctuating trunk of the puffing
frame at almost every bar--an Apollo brilliancy in energetic pursuit of
the nymph of sweet sound. Too methodical one, too fiery the other.

In duets of Hauptmann's, with Nesta at the piano, the contrast of dull
smoothness and overstressed significance was very noticeable beside the
fervent accuracy of her balanced fingering; and as she could also flute,
she could criticize; though latterly, the flute was boxed away from lips
that had devoted themselves wholly to song: song being one of the
damsel's present pressing ambitions. She found nothing to correct in Mr.
Sowerby, and her father was open to all the censures; but her father
could plead vitality, passion. He held his performances cheap after the
vehement display; he was a happy listener, whether to the babble of his
'dear old Corelli,' or to the majesty of the rattling heavens and swaying
forests of Beethoven.

His air of listening was a thing to see; it had a look of disembodiment;
the sparkle conjured up from deeps, and the life in the sparkle, as of a
soul at holiday. Eyes had been given this man to spy the pleasures and
reveal the joy of his pasture on them: gateways to the sunny within,
issues to all the outer Edens. Few of us possess that double significance
of the pure sparkle. It captivated Lady Grace. She said a word of it to
Fenellan: 'There is a man who can feel rapture!' He had not to follow the
line of her sight: she said so on a previous evening, in a similar tone;
and for a woman to repeat herself, using the very emphasis, was quaint.
She could feel rapture; but her features and limbs were in motion to
designate it, between simply and wilfully; she had the instinct to be
dimpling, and would not for a moment control it, and delighted in its
effectiveness: only when observing that winged sparkle of eyes did an
idea of envy, hardly a consciousness, inform her of being surpassed; and
it might be in the capacity to feel besides the gift to express. Such a
reflection relating to a man, will make women mortally sensible that they
are the feminine of him.

'His girl has the look,' Fenellan said in answer.

She cast a glance at Nesta, then at Nataly.

And it was true, that the figure of a mother, not pretending to the
father's vividness, eclipsed it somewhat in their child. The mother gave
richness of tones, hues and voice, and stature likewise, and the thick
brown locks, which in her own were threads of gold along the brush from
the temples: she gave the girl a certain degree of the composure of
manner which Victor could not have bestowed; she gave nothing to clash
with his genial temper; she might be supposed to have given various
qualities, moral if you like. But vividness was Lady Grace's admirable
meteor of the hour: she was unable to perceive, so as to compute, the
value of obscurer lights. Under the charm of Nataly's rich contralto
during a duet with Priscilla Graves, she gesticulated ecstasies, and
uttered them, and genuinely; and still, when reduced to meditations, they
would have had no weight, they would hardly have seemed an apology for
language, beside Victor's gaze of pleasure in the noble forthroll of the
notes.

Nataly heard the invitation of the guests of the evening to Lakelands
next day.

Her anxieties were at once running about to gather provisions for the
baskets. She spoke of them at night. But Victor had already put the
matter in the hands of Madame Callet; and all that could be done, would
be done by Armandine, he knew. 'If she can't muster enough at home,
she'll be off to her Piccadilly shop by seven A.M. Count on plenty for
twice the number.'

Nataly was reposing on the thought that they were her friends, when
Victor mentioned his having in the afternoon despatched a note to his
relatives, the Duvidney ladies, inviting them to join him at the station
to-morrow, for a visit of inspection to the house of his building on his
new estate. He startled her. The Duvidney ladies were, to his knowledge,
of the order of the fragile minds which hold together by the cement of a
common trepidation for the support of things established, and have it not
in them to be able to recognize the unsanctioned. Good women, unworldly
of the world, they were perforce harder than the world, from being
narrower and more timorous.

'But, Victor, you were sure they would refuse!'

He answered: 'They may have gone back to Tunbridge Wells. By the way,
they have a society down there I want for Fredi. Sure, do you say, my
dear? Perfectly sure. But the accumulation of invitations and refusals in
the end softens them, you will see. We shall and must have them for
Fredi.'

She was used to the long reaches of his forecasts, his burning activity
on a project; she found it idle to speak her thought, that his ingenuity
would have been needless in a position dictated by plain prudence, and so
much happier for them.

They talked of Mrs. Burman until she had to lift a prayer to be saved
from darker thoughts, dreadfully prolific, not to be faced. Part of her
prayer was on behalf of Mrs. Burman, for life to be extended to her, if
the poor lady clung to life--if it was really humane to wish it for her:
and heaven would know: heaven had mercy on the afflicted.

Nataly heard the snuffle of hypocrisy in her prayer. She had to cease to
pray.




CHAPTER IX

AN INSPECTION OF LAKELANDS

One may not have an intention to flourish, and may be pardoned for a
semblance of it, in exclaiming, somewhat royally, as creator and owner of
the place: 'There you see Lakelands.'

The conveyances from the railway station drew up on a rise of road
fronting an undulation, where our modern English architect's fantasia in
crimson brick swept from central gables to flying wings, over pents,
crooks, curves, peaks, cowled porches, balconies, recesses, projections,
away to a red village of stables and dependent cottages; harmonious in
irregularity; and coloured homely with the greensward about it, the pines
beside it, the clouds above it. Not many palaces would be reckoned as
larger. The folds and swells and stream of the building along the roll of
ground, had an appearance of an enormous banner on the wind. Nataly
looked. Her next look was at Colney Durance. She sent the expected nods
to Victor's carriage. She would have given the whole prospect for the
covering solitariness of her chamber. A multitude of clashing sensations,
and a throat-thickening hateful to her, compelled her to summon so as to
force herself to feel a groundless anger, directed against none, against
nothing, perfectly crazy, but her only resource for keeping down the
great wave surgent at her eyes.

Victor was like a swimmer in morning sea amid the exclamations encircling
him. He led through the straight passage of the galleried hall, offering
two fair landscapes at front door and at back, down to the lake, Fredi's
lake; a good oblong of water, notable in a district not abounding in the
commodity. He would have it a feature of the district; and it had been
deepened and extended; up rose the springs, many ran the ducts. Fredi's
pretty little bathshed or bower had a space of marble on the three-feet
shallow it overhung with a shade of carved woodwork; it had a
diving-board for an eight-feet plunge; a punt and small row-boat of
elegant build hard by. Green ran the banks about, and a beechwood fringed
with birches curtained the Northward length: morning sun and evening had
a fair face of water to paint. Saw man ever the like for pleasing a
poetical damsel? So was Miss Fredi, the coldest of the party hitherto,
and dreaming a preference of 'old places' like Creckholt and Craye Farm,
'captured to be enraptured,' quite according to man's ideal of his
beneficence to the sex. She pressed the hand of her young French
governess, Louise de Seilles. As in everything he did for his girl,
Victor pointed boastfully to his forethought of her convenience and her
tastes: the pine-panels of the interior, the shelves for her books, pegs
to hang her favourite drawings, and the couch-bunk under a window to
conceal the summerly recliner while throwing full light on her book; and
the hearth-square for logs, when she wanted fire: because Fredi bathed in
any weather: the oaken towel-coffer; the wood-carvings of doves, tits,
fishes; the rod for the flowered silken hangings she was to choose, and
have shy odalisque peeps of sunny water from her couch.

'Fredi's Naiad retreat, when she wishes to escape Herr Strauscher or
Signor Ruderi,' said Victor, having his grateful girl warm in an arm;
'and if they head after her into the water, I back her to leave them
puffing; she's a dolphin. That water has three springs and gets all the
drainage of the upland round us. I chose the place chiefly on account of
it and the pines. I do love pines!'

'But, excellent man! what do you not love?' said Lady Grace, with the
timely hit upon the obvious, which rings.

'It saves him from accumulation of tissue,' said Colney.

'What does?' was eagerly asked by the wife of the homoeopathic Dr. John
Cormyn, a sentimental lady beset with fears of stoutness.

Victor cried: 'Tush; don't listen to Colney, pray.'

But she heard Colney speak of a positive remedy; more immediately
effective than an abjuration of potatoes and sugar. She was obliged by
her malady to listen, although detesting the irreverent ruthless man, who
could direct expanding frames, in a serious tone, to love; love
everybody, everything; violently and universally love; and so without
intermission pay out the fat created by a rapid assimilation of
nutriment. Obeseness is the most sensitive of our ailments: probably as
being aware, that its legitimate appeal to pathos is ever smothered in
its pudding-bed of the grotesque. She was pained, and showed it, and was
ashamed of herself for showing it; and that very nearly fetched the tear.

'Our host is an instance in proof,' Colney said. He waved hand at the
house. His meaning was hidden; evidently he wanted victims. Sight of
Lakelands had gripped him with the fell satiric itch; and it is a passion
to sting and tear, on rational grounds. His face meanwhile, which had
points of the handsome, signified a smile asleep, as if beneath a cloth.
Only those who knew him well were aware of the claw-like alertness under
the droop of eyelids.

Admiration was the common note, in the various keys. The station selected
for the South-eastward aspect of the dark-red gabled pile on its white
shell-terrace, backed by a plantation of tall pines, a mounded and
full-plumed company, above the left wing, was admired, in files and in
volleys. Marvellous, effectively miraculous, was the tale of the vow to
have the great edifice finished within one year: and the strike of
workmen, and the friendly colloquy with them, the good reasoning, the
unanimous return to duty; and the doubling, the trebling of the number of
them; and the most glorious of sights--O the grand old English working with
a will! as Englishmen do when they come at last to heat; and they
conquer, there is then nothing that they cannot conquer. So the conqueror
said.--And admirable were the conservatories running three long lines,
one from the drawing-room, to a central dome for tropical growths. And
the parterres were admired; also the newly-planted Irish junipers
bounding the West-walk; and the three tiers of stately descent from the
three green terrace banks to the grassy slopes over the lake. Again the
lake was admired, the house admired. Admiration was evoked for great
orchid-houses 'over yonder,' soon to be set up.

Off we go to the kitchen-garden. There the admiration is genial,
practical. We admire the extent of the beds marked out for asparagus, and
the French disposition of the planting at wide intervals; and the French
system of training peach, pear, and plum trees on the walls to win length
and catch sun, we much admire. We admire the gardener. We are induced
temporarily to admire the French people. They are sagacious in
fruit-gardens. They have not the English Constitution, you think rightly;
but in fruit-gardens they grow for fruit, and not, as Victor quotes a
friend, for wood, which the valiant English achieve. We hear and we see
examples of sagacity; and we are further brought round to the old
confession, that we cannot cook; Colney Durance has us there; we have not
studied herbs and savours; and so we are shocked backward step by step
until we retreat precipitately into the nooks where waxen tapers,
carefully tended by writers on the Press, light-up mysterious images of
our national selves for admiration. Something surely we do, or we should
not be where we are. But what is it we do (excepting cricket, of course)
which others cannot do? Colney asks; and he excludes cricket and
football.

An acutely satiric man in an English circle, that does not resort to the
fist for a reply to him, may almost satiate the excessive fury roused in
his mind by an illogical people of a provocative prosperity, mainly
tongueless or of leaden tongue above the pressure of their necessities,
as he takes them to be. They give him so many opportunities. They are
angry and helpless as the log hissing to the saw. Their instinct to make
use of the downright in retort, restrained as it is by a buttoned coat of
civilization, is amusing, inviting. Colney Durance allured them to the
quag's edge and plunged them in it, to writhe patriotically; and although
it may be said, that they felt their situation less than did he the venom
they sprang in his blood, he was cruel; he caused discomfort. But these
good friends about him stood for the country, an illogical country; and
as he could not well attack his host Victor Radnor, an irrational man, he
selected the abstract entity for the discharge of his honest spite.

The irrational friend was deeper at the source of his irritation than the
illogical old motherland. This house of Lakelands, the senselessness of
his friend in building it and designing to live in it, after experiences
of an incapacity to stand in a serene contention with the world he
challenged, excited Colney's wasp. He was punished, half way to frenzy
behind his placable demeanour, by having Dr. Schlesien for chorus. And
here again, it was the unbefitting, not the person, which stirred his
wrath. A German on English soil should remember the dues of a guest. At
the same time, Colney said things to snare the acclamation of an
observant gentleman of that race, who is no longer in his first
enthusiasm for English beef and the complexion of the women. 'Ah, ya, it
is true, what you say: "The English grow as fast as odders, but they grow
to corns instead of brains." They are Bull. Quaat true.' He bellowed on a
laugh the last half of the quotation.