One of Our Conquerors, v4
G >>
George Meredith >> One of Our Conquerors, v4
Pages:
1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9
Nesta wrote briefly. The apostrophe was, 'Dear Mr. Sowerby.' She had
engaged to send her address. Her father had just gone. The Miss
Duvidneys had left the hotel yesterday for the furnished house facing the
sea. According to arrangements, she had a livery-stable hack, and had
that morning trotted out to the downs with a riding-master and company,
one of whom was 'an agreeable lady.'
He noticed approvingly her avoidance of an allusion to the 'Delphica' of
Mr. Durance's incomprehensible serial story, or whatever it was; which,
as he had shown her, annoyed him, for its being neither fact nor fun; and
she had insisted on the fun; and he had painfully tried to see it or
anything of a meaning; and it seemed to him now, that he had been
humiliated by the obedience to her lead: she had offended by her harping
upon Delphica. However, here it was unmentioned. He held the letter out
to seize it in the large, entire.
Her handwriting was good, as good as the writing of the most agreeable
lady on earth. Dudley did not blame her for letting the lady be deceived
in her--if she knew her position. She might be ignorant of it. And to
strangers, to chance acquaintances, even to friends, the position, of the
loathsome name, was not materially important. Marriage altered the view.
He sided with his family.
He sided, edgeing away, against his family. But a vision of the earldom
coming to him, stirred reverential objections, composed of all which his
unstained family could protest in religion, to repudiate an alliance with
a stained house, and the guilty of a condonation of immorality. Who
would have imagined Mr. Radnor a private sinner flaunting for one of the
righteous? And she, the mother, a lady--quite a lady; having really a
sense of duty, sense of honour! That she must be a lady, Dudley was
convinced. He beheld through a porous crape, woven of formal
respectfulness, with threads of personal disgust, the scene, striking him
drearly like a distant great mansion's conflagration across moorland at
midnight, of a lady's breach of bonds and plunge of all for love. How
had it been concealed? In Dudley's upper sphere, everything was exposed:
Scandal walked naked and unashamed-figurante of the polite world. But
still this lady was of the mint and coin, a true lady. Handsome now, she
must have been beautiful. And a comprehensible pride (for so would
Dudley have borne it) keeps the forsaken man silent up to death: . . .
grandly silent; but the loss of such a woman is enough to kill a man!
Not in time, though! Legitimacy evidently, by the mother's confession,
cannot protect where it is wanted. Dudley was optically affected by a
round spot of the world swinging its shadow over Nesta.
He pitied, and strove to be sensible of her. The effort succeeded so
well, that he was presently striving to be insensible. The former state,
was the mounting of a wall; the latter, was a sinking through a chasm.
There would be family consultations, abhorrent; his father's agonized
amazement at the problem presented to a family of scrupulous principles
and pecuniary requirements; his mother's blunt mention of the abominable
name--mediaevally vindicated in champions of certain princely families
indeed, but morally condemned; always under condemnation of the Church: a
blot: and handed down: Posterity, and it might be a titled posterity,
crying out. A man in the situation of Dudley could not think solely of
himself. The nobles of the land are bound in honour to their posterity.
There you have one of the prominent permanent distinctions between them
and the commonalty.
His mother would again propose her chosen bride for him: Edith Averst,
with the dowry of a present one thousand pounds per annum, and prospect
of six or so, excluding Sir John's estate, Carping, in Leicestershire;
a fair estate, likely to fall to Edith; consumption seized her brothers
as they ripened. A fair girl too; only Dudley did not love her; he
wanted to love. He was learning the trick from this other one, who had
become obscured and diminished, tainted, to the thought of her; yet not
extinct. Sight of her was to be dreaded.
Unguiltily tainted, in herself she was innocent. That constituted the
unhappy invitation to him to swallow one half of his feelings, which had
his world's blessing on it, for the beneficial enlargement and
enthronement of the baser unblest half, which he hugged and distrusted.
Can innocence issue of the guilty? He asked it, hopeing it might be
possible: he had been educated in his family to believe, that the laws
governing human institutions are divine--until History has altered them.
They are altered, to present a fresh bulwark against the infidel. His
conservative mind, retiring in good order, occupied the next rearward
post of resistance. Secretly behind it, the man was proud of having a
heart to beat for the cause of the besiegeing enemy, in the present
instance. When this was blabbed to him, and he had owned it, he
attributed his weakness to excess of nature, the liking for a fair face.
--Oh, but more! spirit was in the sweet eyes. She led him--she did lead
him in spiritual things; led him out of common circles of thought, into
refreshing new spheres; he had reminiscences of his having relished the
juices of the not quite obviously comic, through her indications: and
really, in spite of her inferior flimsy girl's education, she could boast
her acquirements; she was quick, startlingly; modest, too, in commerce
with a slower mind that carried more; though she laughed and was a needle
for humour: she taught him at times to put away his contempt of the
romantic; she had actually shown him, that his expressed contempt of it
disguised a dread: as it did, and he was conscious of the foolishness of
it now while pursuing her image, while his intelligence and senses gave
her the form and glory of young morning.
Wariness counselled him to think it might be merely the play of her
youth; and also the disposition of a man in harness of business,
exaggeratingly to prize an imagined finding of the complementary feminine
of himself. Venerating purity as he did, the question, whether the very
sweetest of pure young women, having such an origin, must not at some
time or other show trace of the origin, surged up. If he could only have
been sure of her moral exemption from taint, a generous ardour, in
reserve behind his anxious dubieties, would have precipitated Dudley to
quench disapprobation and brave the world under a buckler of those
monetary advantages, which he had but stoutly to plead with the House of
Cantor, for the speedy overcoming of a reluctance to receive the nameless
girl and prodigious heiress. His family's instruction of him, and his
inherited tastes, rendered the aspect of a Nature stripped of the
clothing of the laws offensive down to devilish: we grant her certain
steps, upon certain conditions accompanied by ceremonies; and when she
violates them, she becomes visibly again the revolutionary wicked old
beast bent on levelling our sacredest edifices. An alliance with any of
her votaries, appeared to Dudley as an act of treason to his house, his
class, and his tenets. And nevertheless he was haunted by a cry of
criminal happiness for and at the commission of the act.
He would not decide to be 'precipitate,' and the days ran their course,
until Lady Grace Halley arrived at Cronidge, a widow. Lady Cantor spoke
to her of Dudley's unfathomable gloom. Lady Grace took him aside.
She said, without preface: 'You've heard, have you!'
'You were aware of it?' said he, and his tone was irritable with a
rebuke.
'Coming through town, for the first time yesterday. I had it--of all
men!--from a Sir Abraham Quatley, to whom I was recommended to go, about
my husband's shares in a South American Railway; and we talked, and it
came out. He knows; he says, it is not generally known; and he likes,
respects Mr. Victor Radnor; we are to keep the secret. Hum? He had
heard of your pretensions; and our relationship, etc.: "esteemed" it--
you know the City dialect--his duty to mention, etc. That was after I
had spied on his forehead the something I wormed out of his mouth. What
are you going to do?'
'What can I do!'
'Are you fond of the girl?'
An attachment was indicated, as belonging to the case. She was not a
woman to whom the breathing of pastoral passion would be suitable; yet he
saw that she despised him for a lover; and still she professed to
understand his dilemma. Perplexity at the injustice of fate and persons
universally, put a wrinkled mask on his features and the expression of
his feelings. They were torn, and the world was torn; and what he
wanted, was delay, time for him to define his feelings and behold a
recomposed picture of the world. He had already taken six days. He
pleaded the shock to his family.
'You won't have such a chance again,' she said. Shrugs had set in.
They agreed as to the behaviour of the girl's mother. It reflected on
the father, he thought.
'Difficult thing to proclaim, before an engagement!' Her shoulders were
restless.
'When a man's feelings get entangled!'
'Oh! a man's feelings! I'm your British Jury for, a woman's.'
'He has married her?'
She declared to not knowing particulars. She could fib smoothly.
The next day she was on the line to London, armed with the proposal of an
appointment for the Hon. Dudley to meet 'the girl's father.'
CHAPTER XXVII
CONTAINS WHAT IS A SMALL THING OR A GREAT, AS THE SOUL OF THE CHIEF ACTOR
MAY DECIDE
Skepsey ushered Lady Grace into his master's private room, and
entertained her during his master's absence. He had buried his wife, he
said: she feared, seeing his posture of the soaping of hands at one
shoulder, that he was about to bewail it; and he did wish to talk of it,
to show his modest companionship with her in loss, and how a consolation
for our sorrows may be obtained: but he won her approval, by taking the
acceptable course between the dues to the subject and those to his
hearer, as a model cab should drive considerate equally of horse and
fare.
A day of holiday at Hampstead, after the lowering of the poor woman's
bones into earth, had been followed by a descent upon London; and at
night he had found himself in the immediate neighbourhood of a public
house, noted for sparring exhibitions and instructions on the first
floor; and he was melancholy, unable quite to disperse 'the ravens'
flocking to us on such days: though, if we ask why we have to go out of
the world, there is a corresponding inquiry, of what good was our coming
into it; and unless we are doing good work for our country, the answer is
not satisfactory--except, that we are as well gone. Thinking which, he
was accosted by a young woman: perfectly respectable, in every way: who
inquired if he had seen a young man enter the door. She described him,
and reviled the temptations of those houses; and ultimately, as she
insisted upon going in to look for the young man and use her persuasions
to withdraw him from 'that snare of Satan,' he had accompanied her, and
he had gone upstairs and brought the young man down. But friends, or the
acquaintances they call friends, were with him, and they were 'in drink,'
and abused the young woman; and she had her hand on the young man's arm,
quoting Scripture. Sad to relate of men bearing the name of Englishmen--
and it was hardly much better if they pleaded intoxication!--they were
not content to tear the young man from her grasp, they hustled her,
pushed her out, dragged her in the street.
'It became me to step to her defence: she was meek,' said Skepsey. 'She
had a great opinion of the efficacy of quotations from Scripture; she did
not recriminate. I was able to release her and the young man she
protected, on condition of my going upstairs to give a display of my
proficiency. I had assured them, that the poor fellows who stood against
me were not a proper match. And of course, they jeered, but they had the
evidence, on the pavement. So I went up with them. I was heavily
oppressed, I wanted relief, I put on the gloves. He was a bigger man;
they laughed at the little one. I told them, it depended upon a
knowledge of first principles, and the power to apply them. I will not
boast, my lady: my junior by ten years, the man went down; he went down a
second time; and the men seemed surprised; I told them, it was nothing
but first principles put into action. I mention the incident, for the
extreme relief it afforded me at the close of a dark day.'
'So you cured your grief !' said Lady Grace; and Skepsey made way for his
master.
Victor's festival-lights were kindled, beholding her; cressets on the
window-sill, lamps inside.
'Am I so welcome?' There was a pull of emotion at her smile. 'What with
your little factotum and you, we are flattered to perdition when we come
here. He has been proposing, by suggestion, like a Court-physician, the
putting on of his boxing-gloves, for the consolation of the widowed:--
meant most kindly! and it's a thousand pities women haven't their padded
gloves.'
'Oh! but our boxing-gloves can do mischief enough. You have something
to say, I see.'
'How do you see?'
'Tusk, tush.'
The silly ring of her voice and the pathless tattle changed; she talked
to suit her laden look. 'You hit it. I come from Dudley. He knows the
facts. I wish to serve you, in every way.'
Victor's head had lifted.
'Who was it?'
'No enemy.'
'Her mother. She did rightly!
'Certainly she did,' said Victor, and he thought that instantaneously of
the thing done. 'Oh, then she spoke to him! She has kept it from me.
For now nearly a week--six days--I've seen her spying for something she
expected, like a face behind a door three inches ajar. She has not been
half alive; she refused explanations;--she was expecting to hear from
him, of him:--the decision, whatever it's to be!'
'I can't aid you there,' said Lady Grace. 'He's one of the unreadables.
He names Tuesday next week.'
'By all means.'
'She?'
'Fredi?--poor Fredi!--ah, my poor girl, yes!--No, she knows nothing.
Here is the truth of it.--she, the legitimate, lives: they say she lives.
Well, then, she lives against all rules physical or medical, lives by
sheer force of will--it's a miracle of the power of a human creature to
. . . I have it from doctors, friends, attendants, they can't guess
what she holds on, to keep her breath. All the happiness in life!--if
only it could benefit her. But it 's the cause of death to us. Do you
see, dear friend;--you are a friend, proved friend,' he took her hand,
and held and pressed it, in great need of a sanguine response to
emphasis; and having this warm feminine hand, his ideas ran off with it.
'The friend I need! You have courage. My Nataly, poor dear--she can
endure, in her quiet way. A woman of courage would take her place beside
me and compel the world to do her homage, help;--a bright ready smile
does it! She would never be beaten. Of course, we could have lived
under a bushel--stifled next to death! But I am for light, air-battle,
if you like. I want a comrade, not a--not that I complain. I respect,
pity, love--I do love her, honour: only, we want something else--courage
--to face the enemy. Quite right, that she should speak to Dudley
Sowerby. He has to know, must know; all who deal closely with us must
know. But see a moment: I am waiting to see the impediment dispersed,
which puts her at an inequality with the world: and then I speak to all
whom it concerns--not before: for her sake. How is it now? Dudley will
ask . . . you understand. And when I am forced to confess, that the
mother, the mother of the girl he seeks in marriage, is not yet in that
state herself, probably at that very instant the obstacle has crumbled to
dust! I say, probably: I have information--doctors, friends, attendants
--they all declare it cannot last outside a week. But you are here--
true, I could swear! a touch of a hand tells me. A woman's hand? Well,
yes: I read by the touch of a woman's hand:--betrays more than her looks
or her lips!' He sank his voice. 'I don't talk of condoling: if you are
in grief, you know I share it.' He kissed her hand, and laid it on her
lap; eyed it, and met her eyes; took a header into her eyes, and lost
himself. A nip of his conscience moved his tongue to say: 'As for guilt,
if it were known . . . a couple of ascetics--absolutely!' But this
was assumed to be unintelligible; and it was merely the apology to his
conscience in communion with the sprite of a petticoated fair one who was
being subjected to tender little liberties, necessarily addressed in
enigmas. He righted immediately, under a perception of the
thoroughbred's contempt for the barriers of wattled sheep; and caught
the word 'guilt,' to hide the Philistine citizen's lapse, by relating
historically, in abridgement, the honest beauty of the passionate loves
of the two whom the world proscribed for honestly loving. There was no
guilt. He harped on the word, to erase the recollection of his first use
of it.
'Fiddle,' said Lady Grace. 'The thing happened. You have now to carry
it through. You require a woman's aid in a social matter. Rely on me,
for what I can do. You will see Dudley on Tuesday? I will write. Be
plain with him; not forgetting the gilding, I need not remark. Your
Nesta has no aversion?'
'Admires, respects, likes; is quite--is willing.'
'Good enough beginning.' She rose, for the atmosphere was heated, rather
heavy. 'And if one proves to be of aid, you'll own that a woman has her
place in the battle.'
The fair black-clad widow's quick and singular interwreathing of the
evanescent pretty pouts and frowns dimpled like the brush of the wind on
a sunny pool in a shady place; and her forehead was close below his chin,
her lips not far. Her apparel was attractively mourning.
Widows in mourning, when they do not lean over extremely to the Stygian
shore, with the complexions of the drugs which expedited the defunct to
the ferry, provoke the manly arm within reach of them to pluck their
pathetic blooming persons clean away from it. What of the widow who
visibly likes the living? Compassion; sympathy, impulse; and gratitude,
impulse again, living warmth; and a spring of the blood to wrestle with
the King of Terrors for the other poor harper's half-night capped
Eurydice; and a thirst, sudden as it is overpowering; and the solicitude,
a reflective solicitude, to put the seal on a thing and call it a fact,
to the astonishment of history; and a kick of our naughty youth in its
coffin; all the insurgencies of Nature, with her colonel of the regiment
absent, and her veering trick to drive two vessels at the cross of a
track into collision, combine for doing that, which is very much more,
and which affects us at times so much less than did the pressure of a
soft wedded hand by our own elsewhere pledged one. On the contrary, we
triumph, we have the rich flavour of the fruit for our pains; we
commission the historian to write in hieroglyphs a round big fact.
The lady passed through the trial submitting, stiffening her shoulders,
and at the close, shutting her eyes. She stood cool in her blush, and
eyed him, like one gravely awakened. Having been embraced and kissed,
she had to consider her taste for the man, and acknowledge a neatness
of impetuosity in the deed; and he was neither apologizing culprit nor
glorying-bandit when it was done, but something of the lyric God
tempering his fervours to a pleased sereneness, not offering a renewal
of them. He glowed transparently. He said: 'You are the woman to take
a front place in the battle!' With this woman beside him, it was a
conquered world.
Comparisons, in the jotting souvenirs of a woman of her class and set,
favoured him; for she disliked enterprising libertines and despised
stumbling youths; and the genial simple glow of his look assured her,
that the vanished fiery moment would not be built on by a dating master.
She owned herself. Or did she? Some understanding of how the other
woman had been won to the leap with him, was drawing in about her. She
would have liked to beg for the story; and she could as little do that as
bring her tongue to reproach. If we come to the den! she said to her
thought of reproach. Our semi-civilization makes it a den, where a scent
in his nostrils will spring the half-tamed animal away to wildness. And
she had come unanticipatingly, without design, except perhaps to get a
superior being to direct and restrain a gambler's hand perhaps for the
fee of a temporary pressure.
'I may be able to help a little--I hope!' she fetched a breath to say,
while her eyelids mildly sermonized; and immediately she talked of her
inheritance of property in stocks and shares.
Victor commented passingly on the soundness of them, and talked of
projects he entertained:--Parliament! 'But I have only to mention it at
home, and my poor girl will set in for shrinking.'
He doated on the diverse aspect of the gallant woman of the world.
'You succeed in everything you do,' said she, and she cordially believed
it; and that belief set the neighbour memory palpitating. Success folded
her waist, was warm upon her lips: she worshipped the figure of Success.
'I can't consent to fail, it's true, when my mind is on a thing,' Victor
rejoined.
He looked his mind on Lady Grace. The shiver of a maid went over her.
These transparent visages, where the thought which is half design is
perceived as a lightning, strike lightning into the physically feebler.
Her hand begged, with the open palm, her head shook thrice; and though
she did not step back, he bowed to the negation, and then she gave him a
grateful shadow of a smile, relieved, with a startled view of how greatly
relieved, by that sympathetic deference in the wake of the capturing
intrepidity.
'I am to name Tuesday for Dudley?' she suggested.
'At any hour he pleases to appoint.'
'A visit signifies . . .'
'Whatever it signifies!'
'I'm thinking of the bit of annoyance.'
'To me? Anything appointed, finds me ready the next minute.'
Her smile was flatteringly bright. 'By the way, keep your City people
close about you: entertain as much as possible; dine them,' she said.
'At home?'
'Better. Sir Rodwell Blachington, Sir Abraham Quatley: and their wives.
There's no drawing back now. And I will meet them.'
She received a compliment. She was on the foot to go.
But she had forgotten the Tiddler mine.
The Tiddler mine was leisurely mounting. Victor stated the figures; he
saluted her hand, and Lady Grace passed out, with her heart on the top of
them, and a buzz about it of the unexpected having occurred She had her
experiences to match new patterns in events; though not very many.
Compared with gambling, the game of love was an idle entertainment.
Compared with other players, this man was gifted.
Victor went in to Mr. Inchling's room, and kept Inchling from speaking,
that he might admire him for he knew not what, or knew not well what.
The good fellow was devoted to his wife. Victor in old days had called
the wife Mrs. Grundy. She gossiped, she was censorious; she knew--could
not but know--the facts; yet never by a shade was she disrespectful. He
had a curious recollection of how his knowledge of Inchling and his wife
being always in concert, entirely--whatever they might think in private
--devoted to him in action, had influenced, if it had not originally
sprung, his resolve to cast off the pestilential cloak of obscurity
shortening his days, and emerge before a world he could illumine to give
him back splendid reflections. Inchling and his wife, it was: because
the two were one: and if one, and subservient to him, knowing all the
story, why, it foreshadowed a conquered world.
They were the one pulse of the married Grundy beating in his hand. So it
had been.
He rattled his views upon Indian business, to hold Inchling silent, and
let his mind dwell almost lovingly on the good faithful spouse, who had
no phosphorescent writing of a recent throbbing event on the four walls
of his room.
Nataly was not so generously encountered in idea.
He felt and regretted this. He greeted her with a doubled
affectionateness. Her pitiable deficiency of courage, excusing a man for
this and that small matter in the thick of the conflict, made demands on
him for gentle treatment.
'You have not seen any one?' she asked.
'City people. And you, my love?'
'Mr. Barmby called. He has gone down to Tunbridge Wells for a week, to
some friend there.' She added, in pain of thought: 'I have seen Dartrey.
He has brought Lord Clanconan to town, for a consultation, and expects he
will have to take him to Brighton.'
'Brighton? What a life for a man like Dartrey, at Brighton!'
Her breast heaved. 'If I cannot see my Nesta there, he will bring her up
to me for a day:
'But, my dear, I will bring her up to you, if it is your wish to see
her.'
Pages:
1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9